The Paper This paper is a revised version of a paper first presented at the Ridley College Centre for Applied Ethics conference on “Sex and the City of God” in July 2000. It uses as its jumping off point the long-running TV show “Sex and the City” as an illustration of a postmodern view of sexuality. In this paper I will firstly present something of the disillusioned “morning after” modernity flavour of Sex and the City’s portrayal of “Postmodern Sex Etiquette or Bed Manners.” I will secondly contrast this with “Sex and the City of God: A Narrative Theology of creation, fall and redemption” that makes sense of the mystery of sexuality. The paper outlines our created Sexual Ecology, our fallen condition of Sexual Anarchy, Anonymity, Idolatry and Ideology and the Redemptive possibilities of Sexual Therapy set within a Christian form of social construction aimed at the City of God, not a pseudo form of naturalistic sexual liberation based on a Woodstock like nostalgia for the Garden of Eden.
The Author Rev'd Dr Gordon R. Preece is Executive Director of Urban Seed, Melbourne. He is also Vice-Chair of the Zadok Institute and Commissioning Editor for Perspectives. He is an ordained Anglican minister and author, co-author, editor of eleven books and many articles on work and ethical issues.
Rembrant's 'Bathsheba'
SEX AND THE CITY OF GOD:
A NARRATIVE THEOLOGY OF SEXUALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF CREATION, FALL AND REDEMPTION
For my crime in coming up with this title, I've become a regular watcher of the highly controversial, highly rated and highly popular US cable TV show “Sex and the City” which is also popular on free to air TV in Australia and the UK. It was purely for research purposes, as I tried to explain to my skeptical then sixteen year old son who caught me watching it and wanted to as well. If he had, he would not have been alone. Although broadcast at relatively adult hours, it is watched by many adolescents, and even some primary school children I know of. The show breaks new records in televised frankness about contemporary sexual mores, being the first to use the c… word on TV and offers lavish helpings of bare flesh and sex. But behind the debates about censorship it seems to have struck a chord with many people disillusioned with modern myths about sexuality. Sex and the City is supposed to tell it like it is.
In this paper I will firstly present something of the disillusioned “morning after” modernity flavour of Sex and the City’s portrayal of “Postmodern Sex Etiquette or Bed Manners.” I will secondly contrast this with “Sex and the City of God: A Narrative Theology of creation, fall and redemption” that makes sense of the mystery of sexuality. We will look at our created Sexual Ecology, our fallen condition of Sexual Anarchy, Anonymity, Idolatry and Ideology and the Redemptive possibilities of Sexual Therapy set within a Christian form of social construction aimed at the City of God, not a pseudo form of naturalistic Sexual Liberation based on a Woodstock like nostalgia for the Garden of Eden.
Sex and the City is set in that most postmodern, exciting, and mobile city, New York. It is one of the world’s, and my family’s, favourite cities. Yet New York symbolizes the infinite consumerised desire and sexual decadence doing so much damage to so many and which aroused the wrath of extremist Islam on 11/9. I offer an alternative, but not like that espoused by fundamentalist Islamic or some Christian family values moralists like Jerry Falwell who blamed New York and the US’ denial of such values for 11/9. Instead, while contrasting the city of God, the body and bride of Christ with the city or whore of Babylon, I want to stress that misguided sexuality is cause, not for condemnation, but compassion. Jesus memorably showed this to the woman caught in adultery – yet a compassion guided by his moral compass - “go and sin no more” (Jn 8:8). The Christian narrative of creation, fall and redemption both affirms and critiques our sexuality and points us to true north in the city of God.
Sex and the City is based on the book by real-life columnist Candace Bushnell. It follows Carrie, a sex columnist or sexual anthropologist and her observations of New York’s sexual mores or bed manners. It is based on her own and her successful, smart, thirty something friends’ experiences in their fruitless search for meaningful sexual relationships. Each is notably unsuccessful, each fills the empty hole in their heart in their own distinctive way. “Sexy Samantha, who is in PR, sleeps with pretty much anyone [and does just about anything]; Miranda the lawyer dallies with a man with whom the sex is great but whom she will definitely not marry; Charlotte, the art gallery buyer, is Ivy League, somewhat preppie and, relatively speaking, inhibited.”[1]
Carrie’s provocative advertising pose across the side of a bus bears the caption: “Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex” without a hint that there might be a theological or ethical rather than a merely aesthetic or technical sense of “good sex.” Carrie and her friends' conversation rarely rises above the navel, but masks a poignancy and longing for love in the midst of a succession of one or several night stands. It represents the nihilistic nadir of the modern romantic myth as shown in this excerpt from the programmatic first episode.
An attractive young Englishwoman of Carrie’s acquaintance arrives in Manhattan and is wooed off her feet into a whirlwind romance with a Manhattan male. They have candlelight dinners, make love, even look at houses together before Carrie’s all-knowing voice says:
Then I realized, no-one had told her about the end of love in Manhattan. Welcome to the end of innocence. No-one has breakfast at Tiffany’s and affairs we like to remember. Instead, we have breakfast at 7 am and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the coop. How the hell did we get into this mess. There are thousands and thousands of women like this in the City. They spend $400 on a pair of strappy sandals, and they’re alone.[2]
A series of “toxic bachelors” then voice their views: “Guys don’t want 35ish women who want kids. It ís all about age and biology. I think these women should just forget about marriage and have a good time.”[3] Carrie’s friend Miranda comments bitterly: “I have a friend who always went out with extraordinarily sexy guys and had a good time. One day she woke up and was 41. She had a complete physical breakdown, lost her job, and had to move back home with her mother.[4]
The nymphomaniac Samantha’s solution is to “just go out and have sex like a man - without feeling - treating men like sex objects.” Carrie asks “were women in New York really giving up on love and throttling up on power?” Samantha tries having sex like a man and walking out to work straight after. Later she is told by the guy who had walked out on her before “That was great the way you left. You finally understood the kind of relationship I want. Now we can have sex without commitment.” “Commitment phobia” is alive and well, not only in New York, but Australia also.
In a later episode Carrie discovers the problems of uncommitted sex for herself when relatively long-term boyfriend Mr Big resists even going to a wedding with her, given that her friends are not his friends. The relationship breaks up after he refuses to let her leave some of her girlie things - panties and toiletries- in his apartment where she regularly sleeps, such is the transience of their quest for transcendence through sex.
Contrast this with the biblical pattern of leaving, cleaving, becoming one flesh (Gen 2:24) in which, as Linda Woodhead says:
Full sexual intercourse, full union and intimacy of persons, means more than the sharing of a bed; it means the sharing of day-to-day life and the trivial as well as the momentous moments of life - of birthdays and shopping, illnesses and depressions, meals and holidays, triumphs and failures. It means joining one's bodies not just in genital union, but in time - throughout a lifetime - and in space - in simply living together.[5]
A letter from Karl Marx to his wife (which I in turn gave to my wife for our 25th wedding anniversary) poignantly illustrates Woodhead’s point:
There are actually many females in the world, and some of them are very beautiful. But where could I find again a face whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is a reminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life? Even my endless pains, my irreplaceable losses, I read in your sweet countenance.[6]
Without this continuous kind of context for commitment hypermobile postmodern individualism turns love into a form of narcissism and "all sexual behaviour into a form of masturbation."[7] The saddest comment of all in Sex and the City was "how can you believe in love at first sight in a city where a guy jerks off next to you on the subway." Such is the postmodern, post-AIDs, post - most divorced generation in history’s suspicion of or sense of betrayal by the modern master narrative of romantic love.
In the light of such disillusionment two themes often arise in contemporary media. Many movies - Four Weddings and a Funeral, My Best Friend’s Wedding, American Beauty etc shift the traditional romantic tragic plot of star-crossed heterosexual lovers who cannot connect with the right mate to portray the tragic problem of women who find the best guys and relationships are gays. As Carrie’s gay friend Stanford Jones says: “You know I’m beginning to think that the only place where you can still find love and romance in New York is the gay community. Straight love has become closetted.” TV shows like Ellen, Six Feet Under and Queer as Folk display the increasing fascination with, but in some ways idealisation of gay relationships.
Secondly, conventional heterosexual marriages and families are so stereotypically dysfunctional or invisible that in Sex and the City, Friends, Seinfeld, Secret Life of Us etc the group of friends (or in various workplace dramas workmates), is the only family you have. But the question remains, in ever-shifting workplaces and neighbourhoods, is it enough to have their number on your mobile phone, when they too move on? Or what, as many people calim, your workplace is like the ABC TV series The Office. Again in Sex and the City, on a Friday night at Chaos bar Carrie comments wistfully “its just like the bar in Cheers where everybody knows your name – except they forget it five minutes later.” In such an anonymous, commitment-less, friendly context, where no-name sex thrives, who can believe in love, or even ultimately in friendship?
Yet this postmodern mobility has been mistakenly translated into a consumerist and relativistic morality. The bedroom must not be divorced from the boardroom because the global cosmopolitan urban economy generates hyper-capitalist development of narrower market niches with attached life, spiritual and sexual styles. Think of the powerful pink dollar and the new class sexually expressive individualism that dominates much media and arts and parts of cities and the church. R.R. Reno captures the class captivity of the American Episcopalian push to marry and ordain practising homosexuals well:
The gay lobby, while unappealing in some of its excesses, is fundamentally congenial to the sensibilities of Bourgeois Bohemians. The typical Episcopalian is not very likely to be committed to the homosexual agenda in any focused sense. Some urban parishes have made gay liberation part of their social justice platform, though this is rather rare. Butt that is not the point. The general relaxation of traditional sexual morality is the decisive element. The experience of many upper-class Americans [and Australians] is that it is OK to sleep around a bit - it did not destroy their lives…. “Hey,” says the Bourgeois Bohemian, “if we can neglect the Scriptures on matters of fornication, adultery, and divorce, then why not on homosexuality?” This helps to explain why homosexuality is so important in the Episcopal Church. It symbolizes the Bourgeois Bohemian confidence that liberated sexual practices can be prudently and wisely absorbed into a socially respectable way of life …Homosexuality is also important because it reassures…. If homosexuality is OK, then our transgressions are OK …otherwise we would have to confront the uglier sides of the sexual revolution and would begin to feel the necessity of judgments and condemnations that might threaten our happy marriage of sexual freedom and upper-class respectability.[8]
Contrast the largely old middle class Christian and other family values advocates of the suburbs.[9] This is sociologically where many of our contemporary social, ethical and church conflicts come from. The intellectual elitism that despises the suburbs is alive and well in church social justice bureaucracies. And its hostility is returned in kind. It is hardly an edifying spectacle. While I can be described as a conservative on sexual, family and life issues, though not on many others, I am uncomfortable with either heterosexist or homophobic attitudes. Our identity does not consist in our gender or our social location, and I have lived in and enjoyed both city and burbs. Neither social location is to be idolatrously identified with the city of God, our ultimate end and destination. Such utopias inevitably end up as dystopias, denying others entrance through the gates of the new Jerusalem.
Christian convictions about permanent commitment in sexual and family relationships have often been conveniently co-opted for political purposes by governments (on both sides of the Atlantic and in Australia) stronger on family values rhetoric than providing economic incentives such as employment, tax and welfare policies to encourage such relationships.[10] Equally inconsistently their opponents on the Left often took a libertarian view of sexual relationships as A. H. Halsey notes. Both Thatcherite (and we could add Reaganite) economic individualism and leftist sexual libertarianism undermines the family:
[B]y an irony of history, while Mrs Thatcher forebore to extend the ethic of individualism into domestic life, and tacitly accepted that the family was the one institution that properly continued to embrace the sacred as distinct from the contractual conception of kinship, those who denounced her doctrines of market-controlled egoism with the greatest vehemence were also those who most rigorously insisted on modernizing marriage and parenthood along her individualistic and contractual lines.[11]
Such rampant individualism which women have increasingly mimicked from that governing men’s public and personal lives was captured by the mantra of an advertisement for Lux Calm Body Wash, featured, not coincidentally, during Sex and the City: “I am what I am, and what I am needs no excuses. I deal my own deck, sometimes the ace, sometimes the deuces. Life’s not worth a damn till you can shout out, I am what I am.” Such individualism is only a fair-weather philosophy for those on top. This was shown by the juxtaposition of the ad immediately after: a woman whose face had been torn off in a farming accident spoke of the need for workplace caution. What does the individualism of the first ad have to say to the woman in the second that affirms her individual dignity without the physical beauty that is the prerequisite for it in our society?
Christian sociologist Richard Sennett shows how the inroads of individualism and the cracking of capitalism's moral and spiritual base are exacerbated in our increasingly placeless and virtual global economy. The rapid turnover of jobs and consequent mobility causes what he calls The Corrosion of Character[12] - an erosion of vocational, locational and family loyalty, even for the previously stable middle class. “The global economy does not ‘grow’ personal skills, durable purposes, social trust, loyalty, or commitment” in his view. He illustrates the point from two generations of an Italian immigrant family in Boston. The father worked for many years in the same factory and lived in the same place to provide his family with better opportunities. The son took those opportunities for education and vocational choice, becoming a computer salesman but has had four jobs and four homes by his mid-30s. He is committed to family values but in his highly mobile lifestyle sees no way in which he can concretely embody these values for his children. He fears they will become “mall rats” and turns to right-wing Republican family values to try to put some reality into his rhetoric about family and community commitment.[13] This is the less stark, but equally disturbing suburban equivalent of Sex and the City.
Sennett recognizes that neither private family values, nor the sexual liberation from the constraints of power that his friend Michel Foucault sought, are enough to snatch back the capacity for committed relationships from the grasp of public economic individualism and mobility. As he says “If liberating the body from Victorian sexual constraints was a great event in modern culture, this liberation also entailed the narrowing of physical sensibility to sexual desire.” His book Flesh and Stone shows that our bodies are not merely natural, but also act as microcosms of the macrocosm of the city and the political visions it embodies, whether in Greco-Roman, Enlightenment, postmodern or Christian form. The “Heavenly City” of the Enlightenment sought absolute bodily autonomy, freedom from suffering and freedom for goods to pass through empty space. In contrast a Christian view of the body's goodness, but insufficiency, its pain and exile, in need of God and others, can nurture an alternative vision of the city as a public place and of the relationships, including sexual relationships, shaped by it.[14] That vision, joining the personal and political, the body physical and body politic, is provided by the biblical and Augustinian narrative of the City of God.
II. The City of God - A Story that Makes Sense of Sexuality
Postmodernity gives permission to go back beyond the modern and novel, to the age-old and classical.[15] This is what I aim to do through a partial rehabilitation of Saint Augustine, a theological giant too easily caricatured in many second hand treatments. Much of this is mere intolerance of previous ages, a parochialism of the present, or what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” There is no "charitable cognitive explanation of the attitudes of our Christian forbears" but a "sociological or psychological pathology ... 'the horror of sex' and ... misogyny” is used to avoid facing what they can say to us.[16]
Augustine's legacy is ambiguous. Yet his alleged pessemism and occasional confusion of sin (concupiscence - or disordered desire) and sex, his over-valuation of virginity and of procreation compared with companionship in marriage does not deny his understanding of sexuality in its created, fallen and redeemed reality.[17] Augustine's attempt at discerning the goodness of the created order, the body and its gendered destiny in resurrection in The City of God[18] shows how far he has put his neo-Platonic and Manichean dualism behind him with its devilish denial of the goodness of the body, sex and marriage - the grandeur of being "created to embrace the material world."[19]
Despite some of Augustine and his tradition’s ambiguities on sexuality, today’s “naked public square”[20] needs re-clothing, not in the romantic myths of modernity, which Sex in the City shows are bankrupt, but in the biblical and Augustinian narrative of the City of God. This story, with its realistic and prophetic eschatology or vision of the future city or polity of God,[21] out-narrates these other stories of utopian cities and sexual freedom without consequences. The story of the City of God can transform the earthly city as it did when it inspired Christendom (but minus its coercive and repressive features), the best of early liberal modernity,[22] and some of the world’s most urbane cities or public places.[23]
Saint Augustine's City of God was written in the early fifth century AD at a time of barbarism within and without, to a Roman Imperial age not dissimilar to our own time of sexual decadence which some see as symptomatic of the decay of western civilization.[24] Spiritually, the frenetic sexual quest represents a deep-rooted restlessness. Sex and the City is truest when Carrie describes herself as "restless." This theme is also explored in the portrait of a spiritually and sexually restless Episcopalian priest in E.L. Doctorow's recent novel about New York, City of God.[25] This reminded me of Augustine's sexually and spiritually restless pre-Christian state described in his Confessions as "lord make me chaste, but not yet" and "Lord we are restless until we find our rest in Thee." Augustine tried out many of the ancient world's philosophies and lifestyles but discovered that they were true neither to creation, Scripture, reason, nor his experience. He found true rest in the shadow of the fall of Rome or Babylon (the city of man) through the true story of salvation and the city of God. He consequently reframed his and our sexuality in a profoundly biblical narrative theology of creation, fall and redemption which we will now unpack.
1. Created Order - Sexual Ecology
The created order, provides, to use a postmodern term, the pattern of our sexual ecology. We are gradually rediscovering our natural ecology, that everything is connected and has ecological consequences, from the butterfly flapping its wings in Cairns to the hurricane in Florida. It is ironic, then, that even the most left and green assume that somehow our humanity and sexuality stands outside this natural order in a subjective, consumerist erogenous zone of pure choice.
By sexual ecology, I mean that creation is in kinds or species (Gen 1) not just in our minds. This contrasts strongly with the recent Australian case of “Kevin”, a female to male transexual, lacking male genitalia, whose marriage to a “Jennifer” has been recognised by the Family Court on the grounds that “Kevin” has been living as a male for several years and perceives himself and is perceived by society as male. For all the personal and pastoral tragedy of the case,[26] this ruling capitulates to a Gnostic and Alice in Wonderland like social constructionist view. There, or now here, a word like “man” in the marriage act can mean “just what I choose it to mean,” according to Humpty Dumpty. When Alice objects, Humpty, in classic postmodern style says “the question is, which is to be master, that’s all.”[27] Our own socially produced story or biography trumps biology. As masters of the universe, we make up our own personal master-narratives. As O’Donovan rightly says, this leaves our gender floating above our biological sex like oil on water (in supporting an English judge’s verdict against the validity of an alleged marriage in a similar case).[28]The Australian Government which contested and lost the case is, and is considering appealing, is in my view rightly, contesting the case on the grounds that marriage means people of the opposite biological sex (including, normally, reproductive potential), not just social gender. The ruling really opens the way for homosexual marriage.
Gordon Watson rightly takes the Australian Uniting Church Assembly’s Sexuality Task Group to task for making the same subjective solipsistic and social constructionist mistake as the Family Court. They urge “that we must understand relationships in the Christian koinonia in terms of each individual’s self-understanding” i.e. “perceived sexual orientation”. The Church is to adopt the homosexual person’s sexual self-understanding as an expression of compassion or unconditional acceptance. But this is compassion without a moral compass. “God’s ‘compassion’, at great cost, recreates the creature as a creature”. Based on Gen 1:26-28 seeing the image of God reflected or represented in our being male and female Watson rightly says that the argument “for legitimating homosexuality as a complimentary Christian lifestyle or sexual orientation in fact breaks the co-humanity of the human species as male and female and creates another species called homosexual”.[29] Cf Long –consumer determined….
To use another postmodern term this created order or “structured being (ordered ontology)”[30] includes the basic difference, otherness or more conventionally complementarity of male and female designed to image or represent God to each other relationally and sexually, and to creation through responsible rule (Gen 1:26-28) and care (Gen 2). Homosexual practice is therefore wrong because it is a sexist (yet another postmodernism) rejection of that basic difference, and an overturning of the created order, exchanging natural relations for unnatural ones (Rom 1:26-27ff.).
Some would argue against this that the image of God refers to our intellectual, moral and spiritual similarity to God expressed in loving relationships. Therefore if homosexual relationships are loving (and monogomous) they are to be approved and can be recognised by marriage. However Ray Anderson, building on Karl Barth, critiques Emil Brunner’s advocacy of this more vague view of the image of God as expressed in I-thou relationships (though Brunner does not support homosexual relationships). Anderson and Barth show that the image is spelt out specifically in terms of male –female biological and sexual differentiation. Diagram 1 below reflectS Brunner’s and a common contemporary view of the moral and spiritual image not overlapping with the biological sexual difference. Compare Barth’s more biblical and theological view of this overlap in Diagram 2 which also better reflects the diversity of the three persons within the unity of the Trinity. Eve’s creation was more than a cloning of Adam for Genesis, Barth and Anderson. As the latter summarises the former, “the solitariness of Adam would not have been overcome by another male for such a one could not confront him as ‘another’ but he would only recognise himself in it …. Consequently, Barth condemned homosexuality as “humanity without the fellow man”.[31]
ADD DIAGRAMS POSTED SEPARATELY
Further, creation comes not only in kinds in a static or non-evolving way but also with God-given ends or purposes built in.[32] These include particular purposes; e.g. a knife is made to cut, humans are made to be kind, sexuality is for companionship, sexual satisfaction and procreation and for a supreme purpose - towards the goal of the City of God. This is a culture conforming to God's and our (derived) character as rulers of creation, and as persons, in our case, sexual persons.
So a secondary reason for rejecting homosexual practice (not persons) is that it is fruitless or non-procreational, frustrating part of the natural purpose of our sex organs as the Greeks and Romans and natural law recognises. But Genesis 2:23 does not mention procreation as primary. Adam cries with joy – “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, for from man she was taken.” He doesn’t say “This at last is big hips for childbearing and big breasts for child-feeding!” Paul doesn't mention procreation as his main reason for rejection of homosexual practice in Romans 1 even though it was an urgent imperative in ancient society and soon will be in many western societies with less than replacement population rates. As Paul Ramsey shows, the Roman Catholic church is right that sex should normally be united with procreation over a lifetime, but not, potentially, in every sexual act.[33]
My basic idea of sexual ecology (though not the rejection of homosexual practice) was supported recently by a book entitled Sexual Ecology: Aids and the Destiny of Gay Men by gay activist Gabriell Rotello.[34] He bravely challenges various myths in the gay (but also straight) community which are killing gays especially "the pervasive myth that humans have somehow transcended the limits of the biological world." He argues that “the highly selective spread of HIV around the world shows that AIDS is … an ecological epidemic that exploits certain behaviors, chief among them the practice of having large numbers of partners, straight or gay [and] the single riskiest sexual practice of all: anal sex."[35]
While recognizing some usefulness of safe sex campaigns and condoms Rotello rightly challenges sole reliance on "the condom code" as "anti-ecological, a classic 'technological fix.'" He compares the way over-reliance on the contraceptive pill and antibiotics against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) respectively led to the associated promotion and escalation of promiscuity and to a rapid rise in rates of STDs over time. Currently 20% of Australians have experienced an STD and the rate is rising with greater promiscuity among the young.[36] This is because in our utilitarian or consequentualist world, the consequences, pregnancy and disease, were allegedly taken away and so all constraints were lost.
While highlighting the consequences of reckless sexual practices have a place, as part of a Triple C ethical framework of Commands, Character and Consequences, and empirically back up Christian ethics,[37] the church and the wider community relied on consequences in isolation for too long, as Rotello shows.[38] As one wit put this consequential Christian ethic: “There was a young lady named Wilde, who kept herself quite undefiled, by thinking of Jesus and sexual diseases, and the chances of having a child.”
A biblical ethic has a broader view of our ecological end or created purpose. Rotello disagrees with such an ethic and sees the danger of his arguments being misused by sexual conservatives. His argument is “rooted not in traditional morality, but implacable biology." But unless the moral and biological are arbitrarily separated, the logic of his argument leads towards a moral version of sexual ecology or what Michael Novak calls, “moral ecology.”[39] In this way, Rotello’s logic supports my argument that biology and ecology back up the Bible. God's two books, Scripture and nature, in that order, agree.
Knowing Nature
Well before postmodernity, Emil Brunner recognized this created ecology – “the world is not a shapeless mass of matter, it is not a chaos which we have to reduce to form and order. It was formed long ago ... in a rich variety of form ... In its form the will of God is stamped upon that which exists."[40] I am reminded of the time when as Dean of Residential Students at Ridley College I had a chat with a young university student about his girlfriend staying overnight, contrary to college rules. He told me that some of the students thought that the rules were rather medieval. I told this to the Principal, Graham Cole who said, “oh no, they’re older than that.” So old, in fact, they go all the way back to creation, but by that very fact, always new. The world is a God-shaped cosmos, as Brunner shows, not a chaos awaiting us to redraw the sexual wheel.
Brunner, however, like many conservatives, goes on to mention God's order in our cultural and historical as well as our natural existence, almost baptizing patriarchal western civilization. This raises the postmodern question of social construction of reality and sexuality. What is divine order and what is human disorder? Postmodern sociologist Michel Foucault claims that notions of natural and unnatural are historically, socio-culturally and politically constructed and that almost any cultural and institutional configuration of pleasure can be constructed and depicted as natural.[41] Theological “postmodernists” like Stanley Hauerwas are right to note that “appeals to creation too often amount to legitimating strategies for the principalities and powers that determine our lives” leading us to project our present “twilight of good and evil" onto the canvas/screen of creation.[42] They cite the misuse of the doctrine of the orders of creation to justify Nazi racism and still by some Christians to justify sexism or homophobia. Many still, like Brunner, see men as merely productive leaders, women as receptive nurturers and preservers of life. “It is the duty of the man to plan and to master, of the woman to understand and unite," Brunner says.[43] I recently read a Christian woman’s denial of women’s preaching role based as much on John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women from Venus as on the Bible.[44]
This misuse of arguments from nature has led to the near rejection of creation or nature as part of the Christian master-narrative or the idea of a master narrative at all, because it is seen to justify the mastery of some over others.[45] For instance, James Gustafson argues that “Nature is … of no ethical significance as a source of direction in Hauerwas’s ethics. Hauerwas becomes a twentieth-century version of Marcion.”[46] Similarly, much postmodern theology is now "an Omega that has no Alpha," an end without a beginning.[47]
Oliver O'Donovan traces the roots of this rejection of creation to
“Late-modern liberalism,” the prodigal child of the early modern 16th century Christian variety of liberalism. Liberalism is a species of secularised voluntarism or worship of the will. Shorn of natural or social contexts and norms, “makes his appearance as a naked will, a pure originator ... devaluing natural communities in favour of those created by acts of will” because the former are “thought to derogate from freedom.” This leads even to the “voluntarisation of birth and death”[48] as mere matters of consumer choice.
The contemporary social location of such views can be found among the sexually expressive urban elites or cosmopolitan new middle class who can choose who, when, and where to relate to, and how. Sociologist David Reisman anticipated their looking down on "the provinciality of being born to a particular family in a particular place [and to the desired time] when ties based on conscious relatedness would replace those of blood and soil."[49]
Yesterday’s sociology becomes today’s theology. Liberal Catholic theologian J.J. McNeill is typical in going to the social constructionist extreme. He argues that:
the call of the Gospel to man is not one of conforming passively to biological givens; rather that call is to transform and humanize the natural order through the power of love ... what it means to be a man or woman in any given society is a free human cultural creation.[50]
This is a virtually Gnostic rejection of creation or biology altogether. Likewise, former Uniting Church minister and lesbian Dorothy McRae-McMahon, who resigned soon after “coming out” and resigning, said “this is the way God created me,” But this is an extremely individualistic and subjective distortion of Luther's existential emphasis on “God created me” in his Shorter Catechism. For theologians like the above (not Luther), creation "lacks any inherent good apart from this grasping and humanising,"[51] something any ecologist should recognize as very anthropocentric and arbitrary.
How do we tell if we have grasped this order well or badly without an ontological reference point? It is like trying to grasp a jellyfish, there's no backbone structure or form to hold onto. In the end it justifies violence against created order and form – he (and it is usually he) who grasps hardest wins. We are left with vague values of "justice and love,"[52] which are loosely used to justify sex outside heterosexual marriage in many mainline liberal Church sexuality reports. Without some "authoritative nature" it is difficult to deny the wrongness of pedophilia or bestiality or incest[53] if such relationships are loving, non-painful, or possibly consensual (as Governor General Bishop Peter Hollingworth notoriously suggested on ABC’s Australian Story [2002] in the case of a 14 year old’s sexual relationship with a priest). These practices are likely to be the next battlegrounds as some in the American Psychiatric Association want them recognized as harmless and delisted as disorders. In fact, Michel Foucault, the doyen of postmodern sociologists is quite likely to have been a pedophile, particularly in his final reckless sexual binge before dying of AIDS. Well does Shattuck say “I see his work as a remarkably successful wooden horse, like the Trojan horse Odysseus devised to introduce Greek soldiers into Troy in order to conquer the city. On the outside Foucault’s writings make ambitious claims about periodization, epistemes, discourse, and institutions of repression…. [T]hese claims veil a doctrine of total liberation from all social and moral constraints in order to act out our most violent instincts – above all, sexual. In The History of Madness, he [Foucault] refers to “a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the 18th century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination … madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite (210).”
Foucault refers at the end of The Order of Things to a “mutation” in the “figure of man” through his hero the sadomasochist Marquis de Sade. But for Shattuck, de Sade dishonestly “rides in the belly of the wooden horse.”[54] Such a mutation represents an ambitious attempt to override the order of creation, but Foucault’s death from AIDS shows that it is over ambitious. These Trojan horse social constructionists[55] are the "new Manichees" whom Augustine spent his whole life, and his City of God, largely, but not completely, countering. For them sex acts are merely neutral not natural. But their claim that all sexual distinctions and norms are therefore purely socially constructed or mere language games is to make Hauerwas’s point about our projecting fallen patterns back on creation, into what postmodernists call a totalistic claim. It is a form of relativistic reductionism or the fallacy of "nothing buttery."[56] It ironically becomes a master narrative or universal explanation when postmodernism claims there are no true master narratives.
Postmodern social constructionism is like the projection theory of religious needs - just because we are hungry does not mean that food doesn't really exist. Neither can we say that just because people ideologically abuse the notion of the natural for their own power that the natural doesn't exist. Abuse of the notion of creation order does not deny its use, it just disciplines our discernment of it, otherwise we would do away with sex too, perhaps the most abused of all precious human goods.
We can reject reading natural laws from analogies to animals or from individual body parts like penises being only or primarily for procreation (pity about the clitoris) as unbiblical (see above), un-holistic and impersonal. And we can reject wrong notions of the natural without rejecting all notions of the natural or biological. What we need is "a corrected account of creation; i.e. one which does not crassly identify what is the case with God's will for the world?"[57]
A corrected account will begin by recognizing the three theological tenses of any narrative of nature or better, creation as:
1. Past – Edenic natural laws/ ideals of marriage, including complementarity and procreation, which should no more be ignored than we should "write a sex manual which ignored the laws of gravity;"
2. Present – fallen nature (Gen 3) subject to idolatry and vanity (Eccles, Rom 1:20 ff; 8:18 ff.) but partially restored in Christ now;
3. Future - nature redeemed to reach its goal, for which it, our bodies and the Spirit groan with the pangs of the new creation like a mother in chilbirth (Rom 8:18ff.).
In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus Christ enables us to see all three aspects of sexuality in response to pharisaical questions regarding divorce and marriage in heaven respectively:
1. God's original, natural purpose - one man, one wife for life, (19:3-6)
2. God’s permissions like divorce for hardness of heart (19:7-9)
3. Celibacy or “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom” (19:12) “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (22:30).
Because of the Fall’s disruption to the natural order and our ability to know it (Rom 1:18-32) the Bible and Augustine leave sexuality not "merely to the endless rhythms of nature" but incorporate it in the Christian narrative or redemptive rhythm of creation, fall and redemption. John Calvin and Karl Barth follow Augustine here. For Barth, the ethical question regarding sex is "essentially a question of things that are natural and right," but not "securely naturally known."[58] Our access to the natural is revelational. Calvin describes how Christ, the true natural human or Last Adam puts the Spirit’s spectacles on us to see creation clearly. Now, instead of that Gnostic or Manichean line from the old chorus “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace,” we can sing “the things of earth [including sex] will grow strangely clear in the light of his glory and grace.”
The Truly Natural is Personal and Relational
As well as a Christian creation, fall, redemption narrative of nature, the body and sexuality, we need to emphasize sexuality’s personal and relational aspects. This can be seen against the background of a perverted form of naturalism which absolutizes nature as it is now, fallen nature - not natural law, but natural flaw, if you like.[59] An example is The Bloodhounds songline "you and me baby ain't nothing but mammals, let's do it like they do on the Discovery channel." Another example is that infamous collector of wasps and deviant sexual behaviors from unrepresentative prison and university student populations, Alfred Kinsey. His fraudulent report set the agenda for the sexual revolution with its inflated and oft-cited figure of 10% of the population being homosexual.[60] This biologically determinist position can also be seen in the recent "scientific" depiction of rape as part of a masculine evolutionary survival mechanism and the rather poor attempts to counter this within the same naturalistic framework by some feminists.
A more Christian but still distorted form of naturalism is the Roman Catholic Church’s adoption of the Stoic Ulpian's view of procreation as the primary reason for sex. This was affirmed in the 1662 Church of England Prayer Book (not least because of Henry VIII’s problems having a son and heir), but not by the more biblical and progressive Puritans nor by more recent twentieth century revisions. The priority of procreation was based by the Stoics on our affinity with animals but gives insufficient emphasis to the biblical distinctiveness of our being made in God’s image as male and female, to image or represent God to one another in relationship and the absence of procreation in Genesis 2.[61]
The Roman Catholic social ethics tradition picks up this more personalist emphasis and many Catholic ethicists emphasize that personal union or companionship is as or more important than procreation, without forgetting the latter. Unfortunately the priority of personal union before procreation in sex was neglected in the papal document Humanae Vitae (Human Life) against contraception. This in turn has led many Roman Catholics to throw out of the baby of natural law with the bathwater of an overly physicalist view of natural law. In dealing with the pastoral difficulties of the ban on artificial contraception many priests and people have baptized in its place a very subjective and relativistic conscience clause which can mean anything goes.
A biblical holistic personalism mediates between the extremes of spiritualist/rationalist dualism and biological determinism. We are neither merely rational, according to the more optimistic Greek tradition which damaged Augustinian (though he nearly shook it off) and Christian sex ethics, nor merely biological. Instead we are Dependent Rational Animals in Alasdair MacIntyre's terms.[62] We are dependent or interdependent, not independent of each other in our sexual relationships, despite the Romantic myth of modern/postmodern individualism.
Instead of being a form of sexual solitaire, sex is an expression of our personal, relational nature as men and women made in God’s relational, trinitarian image. This God is the ground and goal of our identity, whether we are married or single[63] When the two become one there is a mysterious image of that trinitarian oneness in difference, where there is a basic complementarity and completeness, unity and non-competitive equality (Gen 2:24, Mt 19:5, Eph 5: 28-33.). It allows us to see that our sexuality is not only or primarily for procreation as in Humane Vitae, nor for mere casual recreation or “communication” as in the postmodern playfulness that misses the seriousness and the need for rules in the best play and games. Instead the essence of sex is for permanent personal union which then provides the appropriate personal and permanent context for the raising of children.
2. Sexual Anarchy, Anonymity, Idolatry, Ideology - The Fall
Anarchy
In Romans 1:24 ff. Paul depicts homosexual practice as a symptom of Gentile idolatry and God’s giving them up to disordered and unnatural desires. As C.S. Lewis paraphrases Paul: "Man has called for anarchy: God lets him have it."[64] This anarchy is a turning upside down of the created order, or our sexual ecology, unravelling all connections.
The anarchy is internal as well as external. In Romans 7:13-25 Paul graphically describes the Adamic self (still existing within the Christian) divided by all-demanding desire, including sexual desire. Following Paul, Augustine partially deconstructed the Greeks’ harmonious soul-body dualism (exemplified in the Olympic ideal of a sound mind in a healthy, beautiful, often naked body).[65] Autobiographically in his Confessions, he explored humanity’s broken sexuality in a much more fundamental way than any postmodern de-centering or fragmentation of the self. Augustine found its source in the Pauline "dissociation of body, reason and will."[66] This leads to a disordering of our competing loves and desires. Desires become demands, captive to the law of sin competing with the mind/conscience’s recognition of the goodness of God’s law.
Augustine’s awareness of our lusty restlessness without God in the Confessions is linked to his critique in The City of God of the lust for power and Empire. “But, once established in the minds of the powerful can that lust for mastery rest until, by the usual succession of offices, it has reached the highest power?”[67] Today the dominance of lustful desire is linked to consumerism through advertising and entertainment as part the US’ lust for global power and empire which much of the Muslim world rightly rejects and sees as a symptom of decadent, sexually anarchical western Christianity, a suburb of Hollywood, not the City of God.
Anonymity
This disordering and dividing of desire also leads to a de-personalizing of sexuality as mere sex - the word which has swept all before it in the last sixty years. The whole of the personal, Augustine notes, both self and others, becomes identified with the part, the genital, seemingly resistant to the rational.[68] This is well-illustrated in Picasso's increasingly depersonalized, distorted and often pornographic paintings of his lovers as he falls out of love and takes on others.[69] It is also sadly obvious in the anonymous, no-name sex of many singles and gay bars and bathhouses expressive of the anonymity of the city and our remaining strangers to one another even in the most intimate of acts.[70] A particularly graphic and depressing depiction is in the controversial and ironically titled movie Romance. The antiseptic white bed, and white sexless smock of the female in Romance demonstrate the depersonalization of unlimited desire. It is frigid, like the master-image of Ang Lee's Chinese critique of western, seventies spouse-swapping sexual mores, The Ice Storm. Lee’s critique and hopeful final thawing of the ice-storm is perhaps informed by the Christian virtue of constancy in his contrasting earlier film of Jane Austen's Emma. People are fragile and need constancy for intimacy and personality to flourish.[71]
Idolatry and Ideology
According to Romans 1:20 ff. - anarchic or disordered and anonymous or depersonalized desire flows from idolatry. Idolatry means worshipping the creature, including sex, not the Creator. It makes good things into gods. As Augustine notes, the basic problem of the earthly city is that it does not do justice to God, by refusing to worship him, and by sacrificing to other gods. In the contemporary world one of these is clearly Eros, the god of sex. Idolatry infects the whole person, mind and body. It means not thinking thankfully with our minds (1:21), not worshipping, honoring God with our bodies. Contrast Rom 12:1, 2 where we are called to present our bodies as “living sacrifices.” As Stanley Hauerwas writes: “Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in [such] a manner that the worship of God is unavoidable.”[72]
One of the insights of postmodernity is that our thinking is never neutral or universal, it is always determined by a particular vantage point. The Bible takes this insight deeper, recognizing that we are what we worship and that our thinking and willing is determined by what we worship, or give absolute worth and glory to. Post Fall, we are not so much rational creatures as rationalizing creatures, trying to justify ourselves. Augustine saw the way the will drags our reason behind it more profoundly than any postmodern questioning of modern rationality.
Wilful idolatry or divinised desire therefore leads to ideology, rationalizing or justifying our wrong worship and lust, our objectifying exercise of power against God and others. E. Michael Jones’ deconstructive and idolatry detection skills uncover many examples of such modern sexual rationalization. He shows how prominent sexual theorists such as Jung project their own particular, parochial western, class based mores onto a universal canvas in order to justify their own practices, because “everybody's doing it.” For instance, Jones cites anthropologist Derek Freeman’s demolition job on Margaret Mead's trend-setting sexual anthropology. Her Coming of Age in Samoa justified the swinging sixties and her own lesbianism and adultery by claiming that Samoan adolescents were engaged in wholesale process of sexual experimentation and free love. Her wishful thinking and lack of local language was unable to detect that her two female confidants were playing a joke on her. Fornication and adultery is not part of coming of age, it simply isn’t adult, one of the signs of adult maturity being the willingness to delay gratification, as psychiatrist Scott Peck notes.[73]
Influenced by the swinging sixties liberal theologians such as Bishop J.A.T. “Honest John” Robinson and Joseph Fletcher built a superstructure of sexual situation ethics[74] on the shaky foundation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's allusive prison references to "man come of age." They believed we had progressed beyond sexual rules and taboos to “all you need is love.” Sadly, for all their concern to reah those outside the church, renegade Episcopal bishops like John Spong and Richard Holloway have learnt little from the sixties or from the age of AIDS it helped create.[75] They sound as dated as their forbears and their views should be retired just as they have. They also failed to take seriously Bonhoeffer’s wonderful and very traditional wedding sermon from prison for his niece’s wedding, even as he awaited his own marriage. Bonhoeffer affirmed that marriage is a covenantal exchange of promises and a continuous calling or vocation which makes love as much as it is made by it.[76]
Further prominent examples of ideologically induced mistakes of methodology and misuse of data regarding sexuality and psychology are described in a range of recent studies. Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, referred to earlier, shows how Kinsey’s Report demonstrates more about his own kinkiness than normal sexual practices. His research into child orgasm was based on experimental sexual abuse of children.[77] Shere Hite’s infamous Hite Report allegedly unearthing the truth of polymorphous female sexuality was so shoddy methodologically it was nick-named the “Shite Report.” Celia Haddon’s Limits of Sex, written by a wounded survivor of the sixties sexual revolution is a devastating critique of a range of sexologists (including Kinsey and Masters and Johnson) dating all the way back to the Edwardian Havelock Ellis (born 1859).[78] It is important to read these exposes of the sex industry as we are now moving from psychiatric to drug therapies, pathologising many women’s alleged sexual dysfunction in order for drug companies to sell a female version of Viagra (which the Church of England is a significant shareholder in. The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) de-classification of homosexuality as a disorder came about under strong political pressure from the gay lobby, not due to any scientific advances, as Jeffrey Satinover shows in The Politics of Truth.[79] Censorship is common for Christian and other counsellors/psychiatrists engaged in corrective therapy for homosexuals and of television advertisements by Exodus in US regarding the possibility of change. Some APA members are now advocating pedophilia’s declassification.
The danger of ideological misreading of sexual history is shown by Bruce Thornton's Eros: The Myth of Greek Sexuality. This myth or ideology had its modern social location in mid 19th century English single-sex boarding schools and Oxford University around the time of Oscar Wilde.[80] It projected its own view of homosexuality as a higher love onto the ancient Greek city to provide a classical precedent for its own urbane view of homosexuality. Similarly, the common view, Foucault’s claim that the Greeks were bisexuals, indiscriminately appreciating beauty wherever it may be found, is a myth.[81]
Thornton shows that for the Greeks, Eros is one of the anthropomorphic gods at creation, foundational to the cosmos and an "inhuman force of sexual attraction." Euripedes calls him "this most unconquerable god", this "tyrant of gods and men." “His breeding is a disturbing combination. He is the son of Aphrodite, goddess of love, and of Ares, the god of war ... He is more street kid than cute cupid. He is lust. He represents all desire that is disastrously excessive." The Greeks, Thornton demonstrates, saw the destructive powers of sex and violence as two sides of the same irrational coin, "creating a violent sex and sexual violence ... a double chaotic energy threatening the foundations of human culture and identity." "Eros needs to be tamed so his potentially destructive powers, which will always exist, can be redirected to human purposes. This was accomplished in the institution of marriage and by the sexual fidelity of husband and wife" with children.[82]
Further, as Francis Watson argues, surprisingly following Foucault, we have ideologically propagated and swallowed a false metanarrative that the Christian and later Victorian era was one of repression and that Freud liberated us for free enjoyment of our sexuality. Rather, the truth of Freud (and before him the Greeks, whose myths he drew upon for his oedipus complex etc) has been repressed. Freud saw sexuality caught in the conflict between the superego or conscience, ego or reality principle and the id or pleasure principle. To use a trivial illustration: imagine you see a beautiful woman. The Id wants to wolf-whistle at her. The Ego says “not now there’s too many people around” and the Superego says “how could you, you’re in church!”
But Eros is no joke. Its natural, irrational erotic power needs to be taken seriously, in a way that Romantic idealist societies who have seemingly tamed nature through agriculture and technology, zoos and wilderness areas are incapable of. Freud sees civilization itself founded on a necessary conflict like Paul describes in Romans 7 between covetous, demanding (often sexual) desire (pleasure principle), God’s Law (superego) and the mind (reality principle) which agrees with the law against the flesh of unlimited, godlike desire or eros (flesh is not the same as body or sex, it includes all ungodly desire, physical, mental, spiritual). Freud when read rightly, backs up the biblical perspective of a pervasive, perverted desire that needs taming. In fact, Paul, Augustine and Freud, in that order, are the three greatest sexual counsellors or therapists in history,[83] Freud more in his analysis of the problems, not in his solutions, for his scientific naturalism felt it had no need of Christ for healing the conflict.[84]
4. Redemptive Therapy and Community
Creation Healed, Romance Restored
The biblical story of the Kingdom of God is the source of complete sexual liberation and wholeness – “creation healed” as Hans Kung calls it somewhere. Its healing powers radiate out from the city of God which has within it the tree of life “for the healing of the nations” (Rev 22:2). Redemptive ethics or therapy is literally a buying back of creation. It channels our sexuality within creaturely limits[85] unlike the modern sexual liberationist myth that allows uncontrolled, covetous desire to flood every part of life – family life in the form of sexual abuse, work life in the form of sexual harassment, recreational life in the form of pornography, virtual sex and sleazy rock videos. In this redemptive way eros or desire is healed and made part of the whole of Christ's sacrificial love or agape.[86] Only the love of the crucified and resurrected Christ can liberate us from this body of deathly desire because it is “stronger than death.”
Though intimately related to identity, sexuality, whether hetero-, homo-, or bi-sexuality, is not to be equated with our identity, for that would be idolatry as Richard Hays’ late gay friend discovered from much hard experience in the homosexual community.[87] Sexuality is not the soul or the whole of the person, though it has taken over its role in modernity, as Foucault notes.
If our sexuality is not the basis of our identity, then sex will not save, or bring wholeness. NGLTF executive director Torie Osborne summed up the more sober post-AIDS view of some:
The radicals won the "sex wars," but we lost the truly radical vision of full human liberation in the process. The idea of sex as salvation and as self, which dominates gay male - and now young lesbian - culture [and many straights], holds no promise for real change; it is consumeristic and ultimately hollow.[88]
Sexuality is not the sin qua non of reality and identity nor the transcendent spirituality many seek. People mistake the sign for the reality it signifies or points to, like the hungry man who saw a sign for hamburgers, went into the shop only to be told “we only sell signs.” If we seek reality in the signs, or if as many postmodernists say, there are only signs or language games, we will be spiritually and sexually hungry. Instead, reality, identity and transcendent spirituality are relational and sexuality ultimately symbolic of a relationship with a relational, trinitarian God. Sexuality and its stabilization in marriage is a sign or metaphor of God's propositioning us, God's marrying his people, in an exclusive, intimate, purifying relationship (in Hosea, Eph 5:21ff, Rev 21:1,2). Contrary to modern romantic myths, this is a realistic and robust divine romance that can re-enchant cynical postmodern sexuality.[89]
In fact a romance will only really work with something like this structure and redemptive substance. D. J. Taylor illustrates this in critiquing the BBC adaptation of Kingsley Amis’ Take a Girl Like You (exploring the all too obvious drunken de-flowering of a young virginal teacher on the brink of the liberated sixties by a man who preys upon her):
If Victorian novels, in which any mention of the sexual act comes by way of a kind of ritualised code, sometimes seem faintly absurd to a modern reader, think how outlandish the art forms of the 1960s and 70s – in which everyone dutifully jumps into bed with everyone else – will appear to the students of, say, 50 years hence. Life, you fear, at any rate outside a few Chelsea [or New York] penthouses, was not like that.… Four decades later, writers and film-makers are still struggling to come to terms with this derailment of the old romantic pattern [of the chase over obstacles], and its moral and technical fallout – in particular the problems it creates with the idea that the hero should be seen to accomplish something, surmount some obstacle, do something heroic. There are sound artistic, as well as moral reasons, for not having sex served up to you on a plate.[90]
The Sexual Body and the Body of Christ
It is vital not only that romance and love be re-framed or re-stor(i)ed[91] but that our bodily sexuality be re-narrated. We are told that 90% of women don't like their body shape. The film Romance shows the depths of female self-hatred where the body and its desires are simultaneously worshipped and hated. The female protaganist sees herself as a mere “hole” to be stuffed by men.
Many men, gay and straight, fall into the same boat in their view of the body, adopting all sorts of ascetic dietary, exercise and surgical disciplines for the sake of fading earthly profit. Something is seriously wrong with the story we are telling our bodies. We need to hear the New Testament story of the body condensed in 1 Corinthians 6 and connected with the corporate story of the body of Christ.
To set the scene. Corinth was an infamous sea-port where sailors were given a good time. In fact just as the Red Hot Chile Peppers can sing of “Californication” so “Corinthifornication” was a byword of the ancient world. The individualistic and over-spiritual Corinthian libertines think that whatever they do with their bodies and their sexual appetites is irrelevant to their soul, and so they have sex with prostitutes.[92] But Paul sees their lawless behavior as unhelpful and enslaving. To liberate them he describes the body holistically, not as something irrelevant to the soul or self[93] and locates the body in relation to the story of salvation and sanctification. Through Jesus’ death on the cross on Good Friday "you were bought with a price" (v. 19). Through the resurrection of Jesus’ body on Easter Sunday your bodies are bound to his in the body of the church (v. 14-17). Through the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” “You are not your own … So glorify God in your body” (v. 19).
There are many sexually soiled and damaged people in our society and churches. In this context Paul delivers the bad news: “Neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts … will inherit the kingdom of God.” But he then boldly proclaims the good news of redemption: “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (9-11).[94] So many have been stained or polluted sexually, deep in their souls, that we need to recapture the old biblical language of cleansing to restore them.
We also need to recapture Paul’s corporate view of the Christian’s body as primarily a member of the body of Christ. As Mary Douglas, the great social anthropologist, says: "The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived …. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience in that each reinforces the categories of the other." The corporeal body is part of the corporate body of Christ, the Church, which functions as a body politic. There is no such thing as sex being a purely private thing. The personal is political. When we bed people we are representatives of the body of Christ (cf 1 Cor chs. 6, 10, 11-12).
This corporate view of the body and of bodily church discipline on sexual issues appears harsh to individualistic modern/postmodern Christians. We need to remember that the early church had no concrete signs such as the sabbath, circumcision or food laws in order to maintain its distinctiveness like its Jewish parent/brother. One of the primary ones was its bodily discipline or heightened sexual ethic, which was one way it set itself apart as a holy people, a third race.[95]
The church sought to preserve the purity of the body of Christ through the purity of the bodies of its members. To maintain her own integrity as a heavenly society that was only sojourning on earth, the Church needed members whose bodies stood apart from the blurring and contamination, the loss of personal integrity and bodily vigour, brought about by easy sexual relations. It was this ecclesial concern that gave the sexual ethic of the early Christians its distinctive edge, its sharp clarity, its reiterated emphases. Modern Christians who feel that traditional Christianity attached undue importance to sexual morality and made it too restrictive need to be aware that their own lack of sympathy with the traditional discipline arises not only from sexual liberation but also from a different ecclesiology, from a lowering of boundaries between the Church and the world. The broad questions of the ... precise sense in which the Christian should be in the world but not of it, need to be ... resolved before the sexual ethic of traditional Christianity can be rightly understood and fairly judged.[96]
Paul and the early Christians were engaged in a form of Christian social and political construction which we need to recapture to regain our integrity and distinctiveness as the body of Christ. Some friends of mine were part of a small group when they discovered that one of the couples, professing Christians, were cohabiting, but not married. They raised it with another couple so it could be discussed in the group but were told firmly that it was a private matter and none of their business. But for Paul, sex is a public matter when it opens the boundaries of the body of Christ to pollution from and conformity to the world. When Christian bodies engage sexually with other bodies they do so first and foremost as members of the body of Christ.[97]
One person who has tried to follow some of the implications of Paul’s view into the public domain is Stanley Hauerwas. He sees faithful marriages as profound political statements of the sovereignty of Christ and the body of Christ over our own personal choices. Hauerwas tells a wonderful story of a man who took a woman out on a first date and as he dropped her off she asked if he wanted to come in. He declined. She said “don’t you like me, don’t you want to have sex with me? Everyone else does on the first date. The man was a bit flummoxed and blurted out “I’m an Episcopalian.” His identity as part of Christ’s Episcopal body gave him the courage to say no. The woman was so shocked she eventually came to his church, was baptised and then married another man! Difference attracts. Contrast the decadent Episcopal priest in The Ice Storm whose participation in the wife/key swapping party broke the resistance of the one woman who was holding out against it. Contrast also Episcopalian bishops like Spong and Holloway misguided attempts to conform to contemporary sexual mores, Spong most recently writing a column for Playboy. Spong’s Newark Diocese was effectively halved in attendance during his time. A little leaven leavens the lump, for good or ill.
As English evangelist David Watson wrote, the real contest today is between Third World Christianity and Islam. Western Christianity is simply too flabby and weak to be in the contest.[98] In a world of The Clash of Civilizations and Global Sex[99] we need to think how the body of Christ can regain a notion of discipleship of and discipline over the bodies of Christians. It is no accident that the growing churches were those leading the way for sexual purity at the Lambeth Anglican Bishops Congress in 1998. The African bishops sought not only to be biblical, but had an eye on the massive crisis of AIDS in Africa, and were concerned to witness to Muslims who see Christianity as acommodated to a sexually decadent western world. We should share their concern, and not parochially accommodate our sexual ethics to trendy, inner-city westerners, while still accepting and loving them.
The really difficult issue though is how to recapture a thick or strong enough community or church life to model committed Christ-like relationships for our younger people under such pressure to conform sexually. The lack of such continuous community explains why Richard Sennett’s young father “Rico” is so worried about his children becoming “mall rats,” hanging around shopping centres out of contact with their parents, sex the main alternative to boredom.[100] An hour on Sunday, or once a fortnight or month, is too thin for that. Without such communal structures we will lapse into mere pharisaical moralism, pontificating and making heavy burdens for them to bear through many years from puberty on. [101]
We need as churches, parents and as a society to make it economically viable for our younger people to get married when they need to during a time of prolonged non-productivity and extended education. Christians are already marrying much younger than the rest of population. In biblical times people married very close to puberty (it occurred later), which was much more sensible, but unrealistic at eight now, or even 18, with extended education. Churches need to look at how we can economically and educationally enable our younger people to marry younger if they need to and are ready (but we need better marriage partner selection and preparation). This is one reason why we bought a house with a very private flat attached, if our children wanted to get married but could not afford accomodation during our society’s period of extended education.
We need to rethink adolescence and sexual education. In fact we should “abolish” adolescence as a modern consumer creation designed to establish an adversarial relationship between teens and their parents and leave them “free” to make market choices. As D. Stephen Long says “Every parent loses his or her children to the market.”[102] To counter this churches need to use the sexual solidarity of their teens to resist the peer pressure of society and the corporate pedophilia and sexual targetting of younger people. A friend recently found his five year old putting up a near-naked poster of the Baptist “virgin” vamp Britney Spears on her wall. Helping children have wholesome sexual attitudes is made even more difficult by the media and Internet. “An American survey last year showed that 68 per cent of all TV shows and 89 per cent of TV movies had some sexual content. As a result, every year US teenagers are barraged with 15,000 sexual references, innuendos and jokes though the media.”[103]
One counter-example is the Southern Baptists’ True Love Waits pledge not to have sex before marriage signed by tens of thousands of adolescents. This is bringing down the incidence of teenage sex in the US to its lowest level since 1973, although a lack of Plan B or harm minimisation backup measures and contraceptive education is naieve and having some bad effects.[104] Our pastor in the US preached on how he’d counselled an adolescent couple not to have sex before marriage, but when it became clear they were going to anyway, he counselled them to at least use contraception and not compound their mistake.
At one Sydney parish I served we had what the youth group called a “Sexathon.” Don’t worry, there was no sponsorship! The real title was Seminar on Responsible Christian Living, particularly sexual living. We sought to create a climate where young people could talk honestly about sexual issues and pressures and overcome the conspiracy of silence in the Church which leads to them often adopting the default position of our culture. The culture has its own strong forms of disciplining the bodies of young people, but in the direction of sexual availability. I write this just after the English parliament has approved the non-prescription availability of the abortive “morning after pill” for sixteen year olds.
Like the Ancient Greeks we need to mentor and apprentice young people, not just boys, into mature, sexual adulthood and citizenship of the city or polis, not in pederastic, homosexual style, as some wrongly claim they advocated,[105] but into citizenship of the city of God as the highest good, even higher than the created good of sexuality.
The eroticization of everyday life has caused the sad decline of non-sexual opposite-sex friendship and cast suspicion on same-sex friendships. We need to recover a range of committed, even covenantal relationships: marriage and parenthood; same-sex friendships like Jonathon and David, Ruth and Naomi; same and mixed sex communities and flatmates. These could help meet the need for intimacy, even touch (“greet one another with a holy kiss” 1 Cor 16:20) but not genital intimacy (unless heterosexually married).[106]
Sex and Heaven
Lesbian theologian Elizabeth Stuart rightly asks "whatever happened to life after death?" lamenting its absence and silence in contemporary church life. She also notes that "No one has yet attempted to do sexual theology from an eschatological perspective." That in a sense has been the challenge we have responded to in locating sex in relation to the eschatological symbol of the city of God.
Stuart is right to note that in many ways we have become like the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection (as the old preacher said – that’s why they were sad, you see!). Suburban fundamentalist family values advocates often collapse heaven “into the eternal nuclear family" even, she claims, “while the nuclear family itself is breaking up."[107] We only have to ask ourselves who are we most looking forward to seeing first in heaven, our earthly loved ones or Jesus, to note the awkward truth in her challenge.
The 19th century novelist “Charles Kingsley thought heaven would be one perpetual copulation in a literal, physical sense, with his wife, Fanny, and illustrated his belief."[108] He believed that Jesus only ruled out getting married in heaven, while earthly marriage continued. But Jesus said there would be no marriage in heaven, not just marriage ceremonies (Mk 12:18-27).
Gay theologians like Stuart see this as part of Jesus’ common questioning of the patriarchal, heterosexual family. Likewise Michael Vasey says that modern evangelical Christianity is unaware of the extent it has bought into the modern project. “Its recurring anxiety over 'family issues' is a measure of how deeply it has sold its soul to the destructive idols of Western culture" - heterosexism and commodities rather than communities. Its hostility to gays is not so much due to its biblical loyalty as to its idolatry.[109] For Hauerwas family values is “how Americans talk about 'blood and soil.'”[110] In effect, for many, heterosexuality and family is heaven.
It is important to hear this challenge without hearing it uncritically. We do, like the Sadducees, make good things, like family and heterosexuality into gods, but contrary to gay theologians, that doesn’t mean that they are not good, just not God. One of the reminders for the church of the priority of God and the city of God over family is the place of celibacy. Martin Luther rightly rejected a corrupted Gnostic and medieval Catholic form of celibacy as a work earning our way to heaven. He reaffirmed the created goodness of marriage and family. But he did not develop celibacy as a sign of heaven having the highest priority, even above family. So an important affirmation of singleness was lost. As an aside, although problems of abuse by Catholic priests have been blamed on celibacy and some modifications of compulsory celibacy should be made to stop the priesthood, especially in the US, becoming a gay ghetto, the important role of celibacy as an anticipation of heaven should not be lost.
The truth between the two extremes or heresies of Sadduceeism or Gnosticism is found in 1 Cor 7:25-40. There Paul encourages singular devotion to God, with a preference for singleness for those gifted to be single, but liberty to marry for those so gifted, lest they be distracted by their sexual needs. Nonetheless, “the appointed time has grown very short; from now on those who have wives should live as though they had none … for the form of this world is passing away.” (29-31). Paul may be accommodating himself to the Corinthian ascetics. He may have in mind a particular crisis or a famine, which some have argued to avoid having him make a mistake about the time of the second coming. Or, as I believe, he may be highlighting the perpetual state that we are in short of the second coming. Marriage is great, I am very happily married, but it is not the meaning of life, only a reminder and sign of it, as celibacy is in its own way. A reaffirmation of celibacy, and celibate communities, without the sense of compulsion, might be one of the best ways to pastorally support the homosexually inclined, and counter the eroticization of same-sex relations and the sexual fetishization of friendship.
Sexual Liberation - Back to the Garden or on to God’s City?
Paul’s realistic narrative and eschatological theology is foreign to many contemporary family values advocates quest for heaven in family and also to many sexual liberals quest for an Eden of free sexual expression. The Woodstock generation sang their anthem along with Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: "we are stardust, we are billion year old carbon, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden" as they romped and played naked in rain and mud, like Israel before the Golden Calf (1 Cor 10:6-8). Sex was salvation, paradise, the garden of Eden or the city of God.
Rutillo adopts a more realistic ecological and cultural perspective. He says: “Deep ecology recognizes that our thoughts, beliefs, and social systems are as much a part of nature's web as any other factor in ecology" and "require fundamental changes in human organization and philosophy" if we want "sustainable solutions." [111] Contrary to the notion of gay sex as historically unchangeable, the relatively recent gay gym culture with its incredible discipline over the body shows how cultural discipline can bring change.[112] Rutillo wants to go back to the more Greek type of spiritualized, self-controlled sex.[113] He rightly argues for the use of social incentives towards monogamy, recognizing that monogamy is not merely natural, but cultural, and constrained by social reward systems nearly universally. However, Rutillo has no moral motivation to back up his purely naturalistic approach: "I have no moral or ideological argument with promiscuity whatsoever when it doesn't kill people.” We accomodate to ourselves, our psyches and the world, in whatever ways make us and others happy. “One can be a promiscuous saint, I believe, or a monogomous creep."[114] I’ve met monogamous creeps, but never a promiscuous saint, unless they were a repentant one. For all his positive health proposals within the gay context, Rutillo is a moral relativist. He also fails to reckon with Thornton’s demonstration that the Greek form of therapy for erratic eros was heterosexual marriage.
Theologians too can mimic a seventies romanticism about sexual liberation. James Nelson, whose books have been eagerly cited by many of the mainline liberal sexual reports in the nineties has a book entitled Between Two Gardens about Eden and the Edenic garden in Song of Solomon. But Nelson, like many Romantics is utterly utopian and naive in thinking that sex as we know it now is unambiguously good, as if there is no flaming sword blocking our way back to the garden of pure sexual delight. He highlights the idyllic romanticism of the garden in Song of Songs over the fallen garden of Eden with its tension between the innocence and ambiguity of sex. Nelson has no sense of the end of sex, no eschatology, no sense of the garden's goal in the City of God, and therefore no reason for sexual restraint.[115]
So much of the utopian liberal sexual agenda sees our sexuality as our property, merely limited by the rights of others, rather than part of our person. It shows a Pelagian naivety about human nature and unfettered, neutral freedom, limitless liberty, as if each sinful act is atomistic with no long chain of after-effects. It assumes that a positive view of the body based on the Incarnation,[116] a bit of sexual therapy