Archive - January, 2010

Inhabiting the Cruciform God (Part 2: Nonviolence)

January 31, 2010 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments

I began my engagement with Inhabiting the Cruciform God by highlighting some of what Michael Gorman does with justification. This time, I want to focus on non-violence, the subject of chapter 4.

I focus on this for a couple of reasons. One, no doubt, is the existential angst that is generated in yours truly from reading about non-violence in the Christian story while continuing, with my dearly beloved wife, to try to catch up to the current season of 24 (we’ve covered almost 7 seasons in the past 17 months). *ahem*

Another reason is that it seem to me that this argument needs a bit of a bullhorn to be heard. Even folks who are otherwise deeply influenced by the narrative dynamics in NT ethics that Richard Hays and others have pointed out are not quite ready to jump on board the pacifism train. There’s an important argument that needs to be heard here.

Even if one is not prepared to be a pacifist when confronted with every geo-political question (as I am not), the gospel narrative nonetheless undermines other ways in which the church has, and does, employ violence in its life together. That is to say, a Christian ethic that has fully imbibed the cruciform calling of the Christian life will call us to repentance for many of the ways that the church chooses to exert its power.

This applies not only to baptizing military engagements with the name of Christ (does the cross make all such baptisms heretical denials of the Christian story) but also physical, emotional, and social acts of violence in which we assert power in order to gain some measure of life for ourselves–even if it comes at the cost of another’s. Yes, what I’m saying is that most of the ways things are done in church council meetings, congregational meetings, Presbytery and Assembly and classis meetings demand repentance rather than a celebration of work done as if by the Spirit of God.

The main thrust of Gorman’s argument is that Paul’s encounter with the resurrected Christ transformed the apostle’s understanding of the means by which God would justify His people. Paul was participating in the pursuit of justification by violent zeal that had its precedent in Phinehas and the Maccabees. Violent defense of God’s cause was the means by which he was striving to honor the identity of the people of God and live into the holy life that God desired (131-37).

This means that we must not overlook one of the fundamental elements of Paul’s conversion. He now understood that God did not justify on the basis of distributed violence, but through the absorption of violence on the cross (130). The resurrection was, itself, God’s justification, God’s vindication, of a crucified Messiah. And so, confronted with this resurrected one, Paul’s vision for a life lived in submission to God was turned on its head (138-40).

Put simply, “The experience of the resurrected crucified Jesus leads Paul to an ethic of dying rather than killing” (144).

And that, I never tire of arguing, is the fundamental reversal of the economy of the world that we find narrated in the gospel story: in a world where we are instructed (consciously and unconsciously) to pursue life for ourselves at any cost–even the life of another, the Gospel of a crucified messiah says that the true means to gain life for ourselves is to pursue life for another–even if it comes at the cost of our own.

The Kindle Dilemma

January 30, 2010 in Kindle Reading with 10 Comments

This Christmas, my dear wife purchased me an e-reader. It started out as a Barnes and Noble Nook, but after some research (especially into how many academic-type books there are on each) I decided a Kindle was more useful to me. So I ordered one.

And waited.

And waited.

Its delivery was delayed, one got lost in the mail, and mine finally arrived on the day after Apple made its big iPad announcement.

Thus the dilemma: do I keep the Kindle, or send it back in anticipation of getting a cool new Apple product?

I decided to keep the Kindle. The reasons had mostly to do with the fact that I don’t need another computer-like device: I have a MacBook, I’ll probably have an iPhone in a couple months, I have a smart phone now. I don’t need another e-mail machine, etc.

There was also the concern that with as much as it does, the iPad won’t do as well the one thing that the Kindle does: allow me to read books.

The Kindle has an easy-to-read screen and an extraordinarily long battery life (40ish hours). The max “10 hours” of the iPad didn’t sound all that attractive in comparison, and the screen would be much harder on the eyes.

So I opened my Kindle, but still not entirely sure what I’d do with it. Do I purchase professional books in a format that might become obsolete? Do I buy fiction books that I might read once or twice–but could have checked out of the library?

Then I found my way.

My Kindle exists primarily to provide me with countless hours of reading in classic literature that I can download for free from the internet. So, in honor of this lovely device and its newfound home in my heart, I offer you the first sentences of some of the books I uploaded in my first Kindle “book run”:

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”

“Κατ͗ αρχάς παρουσιάζονται προ των βωμών που ήσαν εμπρός από το ανάκτορον του Οιδίποδος γέροντες και νέοι Θηβαίοι στεφανωμένοι με ικετηρίους κλάδους.” (diacritical marks kept as they are in the eb00k)

“The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.”

“A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,Yeah, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.”

“A wolf, finding that the sheep were so afraid of him that he could not get near them, disguised himself in the dress of a shepherd, and thus attired approached the flock.”

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with  a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”

“My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.”

“At night, in winter, when the snow-flakes fall slowly from heaven like great white tears, I raise my voice; its resonance thrills the cypress trees and makes them bud anew.”

“In the war of Troy, the Greeks having sacked  some of the neighbouring towns, and taken from thence two beautiful captives, Chryseis and Briseis, allotted the first to Agamemnon and the last to Achilles.”

“Those who undertake to write histories, do not, I perceive, take that trouble on one and the same account, but ofr many reasons, and those such as are very different one from another.”

“Call me Ishmael.”

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

That’s the first line of about 1/5 of the free books I uploaded to my reader in about 45 seconds. I’m not trying to sell these things, but mine now has a purpose. And I have a mission: read everything.

Pride

January 29, 2010 in Uncategorized with 0 Comments

There’s a powerful post: Pride, By Any Other Name over on Onesimus Online by William Black. At least, I mean, er… it would be powerful if I knew what he was talking about.

Here’s a little teaser:

I turn and find it in the church where massive egos self-protect and let the Lord alone be crucified. Pulpit poses, postured praises, all for reputation’s sake.

Inhabiting the Curicform God (Part 1: Justification)

January 29, 2010 in Book Reviews with 11 Comments

If you don’t know who Michael Gorman is, you better find out in a hurry.

I use his Apostle of the Crucified Lord in my Acts- Revelation course because (a) students devour it; and (b) once they have, they speak of Paul differently, they read Paul differently, their understanding of the gospel is articulated in terms of the narrative of the cross.

I use his Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross in my Cross in the New Testament course because (a) I want my students to understand that biblical “ethics” is about living into a story, not about lists of right and wrong; and (b) because I want to subvert the idea that when we study the cross in the New Testament the most important thing is “theories about the atonement.” No, discipleship and “spirituality” are the more prominent interpretations of Jesus’ death on the cross.

If you want a quicker in to Gorman’s reading of Paul, you can check out his Reading Paul for a great orientation.

But in this and one subsequent post I want to say a few words about Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (for my gratis copy of which I pass on my thanks to the goodly folks at Eerdmans). Today I mostly want to talk about justification, next time we’ll deal with nonviolence.

Gorman begins with a reading of the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2, which he calls Paul’s “master story.” “Although/because Christ existed in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be exploited for gain, but emptied himself…” Although [x] not [y] but rather [z]. That’s Paul’s narrative.

The surprise of this story is that Christ reveals what it means both to be truly God and what it means to be truly human by not exploiting the power and position he had, but by self-emptying (=kenosis). For Paul as an apostle, his own life story must manifest the same: although he’s an apostle, he doesn’t exploit his position for gain, but labors and gives himself for the salvation of the churches (see 1 Thess 1, 2 Cor throughout).

We come now to chapter 2, whose subtitle begins, “justification by co-crucifixion.”

Gorman argues for a vision of participation in Christ in which justification happens by co-crucifixion. This means, among other things, that we must never imagine that there is a rift between justification and transformation (= sanctification) or between justification and justice. For my part, I would suggest that Gorman is here part of a growing chorus of voices that is helping get Paul scholarship back to one of the most important aspects of Reformed theology, one that had been set aside by several generations of Paul scholarship (perhaps culminating with E. P. Sanders): justification is a facet, and function, of Paul’s union with Christ soteriology.

For Gorman’s proposal concerning justification, two elements are indispensable: (1) the faithfulness of Jesus, expressed in going to the cross, is the reason that the cross effects our justification; and (2) this faithfulness is covenant faithfulness–fulfilling a covenant that demands both love of God and love of neighbor.

In short, what this means is that being united to the story of the self-giving son, Christians find themselves reconciled to both God and other people–and living into the narrative of God- and neighbor-love as the Spirit who joins them to Christ works out his cruciform image in them as individuals and as communities.

The means by which justification is accomplished (Christ’s faithful death) demonstrates the mode by which it comes to us (our own faithful response to God) and the manner in which we are called to live in the present (59).

In working out this theology, Gorman stresses that it is by grace: it is not self-generated; it is corporate: we are not saved on our own, but in Christ and as part of a body; it is an introduction into a new life that includes participation now in Jesus’ resurrection (69-70).

How does transformation happen in the Christian life? “Paradoxically, this death experience called faith results in life, both present and future” (80).

Two crucial take-home points for Pauline soteriology emerge from this chapter: (1) justification and union with Christ are not two separate theological models, but one model in which the former is a component part of the latter; and therefore (2) justification can never come without personal and corporate transformation into the image of the crucified and risen messiah.

Next up: co-crucifixion and non-violence.

Cutting Yourself Off

January 28, 2010 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments

“… if you let yourself be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you… you have cut yourselves off… I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves” (Gal 5:2, 4, 12).

Thanks, Paul, for that lovely series of visual images. I get the point.

Be careful what you cut, people. Be careful what you cut.

Mission and Purity

January 28, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 1 Comment

This weekend our church was looking at Mark 7. This is a challenging chapter on numerous fronts. It shows Jesus in a controversy over purity rituals in which he argues for upholding God’s law rather than setting it aside in favor of human tradition. And then, in the explanation of purity issues to the crowds and disciples, Mark tells us that Jesus sets aside the Law as it pertains to dietary restrictions.

The reorientation of purity is telling: the story of Israel is being transformed. With the advent of the Kingdom of God, the posture of the people is being definitively defined as a people whose purity can be maintained without retreating from the world, a people who look within for the sources of impurity and are thereby freed to mingle themselves freely with the world without fear of contagion. In fact, as the larger story shows, the people of God are being prepared to carry on Jesus’ mission of reversing contagion: when pure and impure touch, the power of purity proves to be the greater.

The stories on either side of this purity episode frame the narrative so as to provide an alternative vision of the power of purity in God’s dominion.

The antecedent story is a short, summary narrative describing Jesus’ healing power. In contrast to the concerns to keep one’s hands to oneself and carefully cleaned that we see in Mark 7, this story at the end of Mark 6 is one of abundant contact: people wanted to touch Jesus, even the hem of his robe, and as many who did found healing. This is a picture, however underdeveloped, of an alternative story of power from the story of segregation for purity’s sake. Whereas the latter trades on a vision of uncleanness as the greater power against which the people of God must huddle together and from which they must flee, the story of healing by touch tells a story of a greater power than the power of uncleanness, sin, death, and decay. The power of God is at hand.

Subsequent to the story of uncleanness, Jesus goes into the region of Tyre and Sidon and, what do you know? actually runs into a woman from that region! We are told that Jesus wanted to remain unknown, but that he was not able to hide. Of course he couldn’t hide! The light has been lit, not to be kept hidden–nothing is hidden except to be revealed. The power of the kingdom cannot be contained, the story of separation and segregation is giving way to the mission of God.

The interaction between Jesus and the woman is deeply troubling–doesn’t he basically call her a Gentile dog? “It’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” he says to the woman who is calling for aid for her daughter. But when this faithful woman is willing to appeal for the crumbs from the table, Jesus grants the request. And then? The conversion. The healed one is no longer dog, but child (τὸ παιδίον)–like those at the table (τῶν τεκνῶν).

How do we understand the story of the mission of God? It demands to be understood as a story that turns the narrative of the world on its head. Too often, those who proclaim faith in Jesus view our position in the world as the small, persecuted, powerless minority, striving as best we can to plug our little Christian narratives into the overwhelming narrative of sin, death, and corruption. And when we see ourselves as so small, and our power as so slight, we perceive our calling as one of making holy enclaves, to protect ourselves from the impurities and powers of the world.

How different is our posture when we see that the big Story, the True Story, is the story of a kingdom come with power–a power that does not succumb to the powers of the world, either by imitation or by retreat. We do not come as agents of a small story into the overwhelming true story of the real world; no, we enter as agents of the true story, messengers of the true king, whose story ultimately determines the outcome of the little stories of power, separateness, and segregation.

If we touch the other, what will happen? Will we become impure, or do we trust that the healing and embracing power of God will go forth?

World Upside Down (part 2)

January 27, 2010 in Book Reviews with 4 Comments

Continuing our review of C. Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down, we come to the synthetic chapter (chapter 4, where he works through a narrative in tension between the church being a catalyst for instability and its innocence in Roman court) followed by a final chapter that works out the theological implications of the study.

Chapter 4 bears the title of the book, “World Upside Down,” and uses the Jewish charges against the Pauline mission in Acts 17 as its springboard. He traces three interrelated characteristics of the early church: they proclaim Jesus as universal king; this, in turn, sets the church on a universal mission; and that mission is generative of communities that are, in some sense, set apart from their surrounding cultures.

Rowe argues that the charges brought against the Christians accurately reflect Luke’s theological assessment of the early Christian movement: “these men who have turned the world upside down have come here, too…. They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, proclaiming that there is another King, Jesus.” He maintains that there are three points aimed at one overarching charge of sedition: “by proclaiming another king, the Christians act against the decrees of Caesar and thereby turn the world upside down” (95-96).

Rowe goes on to say that “Jesus is king” is a confession that sets up a rival to Caesar. Moreover, Jesus’ kingship is embodied in a this-worldly transformation: it impacts the world within which we live. The force of Jesus as rival to Caesar is underscored by Luke’s use of κύριος as a title for each (106). A rivalry is created: Christians must deny what Caesar claims for himself and hence his authority on earth. Jesus comes to establish a rival peace as a rival king by rival means (in particular, suffering and death, 115).

Finally, it must be remembered that it is Jesus’ resurrection that is the impetus for mission: Jesus as Lord of all is the reason that a mission that extends to all generates communities to the ends of the Roman empire. (Some of my readers will be surprised not at all by the fact that this portion of my book has lots of “Yes!” in the margin.)

The final chapter draws some theological conclusions. It is no accident, Rowe claims,  that when a whole set of practices constitutive of pagan culture are called into question (such as sacrifice, magic, temple-based economics) that the culture is confronted with possible collapse (146). “To see the potential of the Christian mission for cultural demise is to read it rightly. Indeed, this is but the flip side of the reality that God’s identity receives new cultural explication in the formation of a community whose moral or metaphysical order requires and alternative way of life” (146).

In Luke’s telling of the story, the formation of alternative communities, with alternative cultures, is inseparable from the reality of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead to be lord over all. Moreover, the existence of such communities, with their alternative forms of life, become the context within which the truth can be spoken and known (161). Thus, the Christian claims are “madness”–but only to those without eyes to see (162).

But this inability of the outsider to see is one part of a story told for the purpose of demonstrating the inherent necessity of Christian mission. All, even Rome, need conversion so as to understand the true story of Jesus. This, though, is not a coercive narrative, for “Acts narrates the life of the Christian mission as the embodied pattern of Jesus’s own life… Put succinctly, according to Acts, the missio Dei has a christological norm” (173).

The final part of the final chapter, where the missional implications of the Christian message are explored, are worth their weight in gold. Rowe has written a bold piece of theology.

Of course, I do have a couple of quibbles, and since I don’t want you to think that either my free book or my friendship with an author has overmuch colored my opinion, I offer a disagreement for your consideration. I am not as persuaded as the author that “Lord” (κύριος) is a cipher for the God of Israel, such that calling Jesus lord equates him ontologically with God–Jesus is God of all if Lord of all. Rowe references some of his earlier work, in which he has argued that the use of κύριος language in Joel, quoted in Acts 2, identifies Jesus with the God of Israel.

To my reading of Acts 2, this imports too much into the text that stands in tension with the actual things Peter says about Jesus and God. Jesus was a man testified to by God through signs and wonders. The distinction is important. Moreover, I notice Rowe saying that the resurrection confirmed or affirmed Jesus as lord, but Peter in Acts 2 (like Matthew 28 and Romans 1, etc.) that at the resurrection God made (ἐποίησεν) Jesus Lord and Messiah. Something happened to Jesus at the resurrection, he became something he was not before–he was made Lord of all, his name became the name by which salvation is made known.

But this disagreement, I think, detracts little from the meat of the work, which offers a bold new thesis on the purpose of Acts and will surely provide fodder for considerable debate in the future. (For example: at an SBL book review session in Atlanta…)

What I like most about this book is how it moves from historical exegesis to theological imperative, angling itself against the idea that we read disinterestedly, and uncovering false visions of “inclusiveness” that have no room for the sorts of sweeping claims made by the early church. The theology, in particular, merits sustained attention.

Disclaimer: Like every academic who reviews a book for a journal or online venue, I received a complimentary copy of Word Upside Down from Oxford University Press.

Hermeneutics, Identity, and Ethics

January 27, 2010 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

For the past several days we’ve been in the weeds of a particular issue: the helpfulness (or lack thereof) of “authenticity” as a criterion for assessing our actions. I want to put such reflection within the larger project which is this blog / my life.

Increasingly I realize that for “people of the book” hermeneutics (i.e., how we interpret the scriptures as relevant for our own lives), our identities as people located in particular faith communities, and our ethics are inseparable. In my theoretical world of biblical scholarship, this means that identity and ethics follow self-conscious biblical interpretation, but in the real world all three of these influence each other, and any one can be the driving force for the other two.

“Storied Theology” is a phrase coined as both an indicative and an imperative. (1) It is descriptive of the kind of theology we find in scripture. God has tied himself to a particular people’s story and history, and revealed himself as a character within its drama. The consummate revelation of this God is in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. (Of course, what “consummate revelation” means will vary by biblical author, but that’s another topic for another day.)

(2) The biblical storying of God is not merely what we see, but what we’re called to do and what we’re called to live into.

Put these things together and you get any number of ramifications. One of them is what we have seen over the past week: our lives must be read as part of a narrative that is defined by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Together, this network of events tells us: (1) that God must exercise transformative power in order for this world to be a place that honors and glorifies him; (2) that sin exercises real power and produces real guilt that must be dealt with as God makes all things new; and (3) that the world is heading for a time of fulfillment and restoration.

This means, in turn, (1) that our lives must seek out and participate in the transformation God is seeking to bring about if we (Christians) are to faithfully bear the name of God’s king (Christ) into the world but also that the world we encounter is so beautiful and good as to merit restoration;  (2) that we must not set ourselves up as the measure of our own activities but rather we must anticipate that we will often feel the pull of doing what is evil and that we’ll do many things requiring forgiveness; and (3) that we must have hope as we look for the world (including ourselves) to become what we are not yet, and that we must use the glorious future (not the broken present) as our canon.

Life. Death. Resurrection. Those give shape to the narrative God has written his people into.

About a year ago I was having dinner with someone who expressed astonishment about a conversation he’d had with a Christian. The person rapidly insisted that the crucial things were to believe in the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus. “But religion,” my friend said, “is about making you a better person, not all that other stuff.” Well, yes. To both. Religion is to transform us into something better, to open up communion with something higher. But we only know what that “something” is, what the shape of being a “better person” might be when we know what our story is.

Because Christian theology is storied theology, it’s imperative that we get our story straight. Looks like I got a bit distracted here. How does all this story stuff impact hermeneutics as a former of our identities as well as our ethics? Stay tuned.

World Upside Down (Part 1)

January 26, 2010 in Book Reviews with 2 Comments

Last week I read C. Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down and wanted to say a few things about it here. As I indicated in my brief mention of the book last week, the book is a great “fit” for the Storied Theology theme that I hope somehow will (loosely) hold my blog together.

Rowe declares that it’s high time to reassess the notion that Acts is written, in large part, as political apologia, storying the compatablity between Rome and the church. And yet, he does not want us to fall off the horse on the other side, either, and turn Acts into a tract for political liberation through resistance movements.

Instead, Acts is “a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative total way of life–a comprehensive pattern of being–one that runs counter to the life-patterns of the Graeco-Roman world.” It is thus “a culture-forming narrative” (4).

The book is structured so as to, first, give attention to the collisions between Acts and pagan culture. In chapter 2, “Collision,” Rowe highlights the ways in which the narrative of Acts serves to undermine the reading which assumes that the church is not a threat to the Roman culture. The “new cultural reality” established by the church means that the sorts of uprisings we see in Lystra, Philipi, Athens, and Ephesus are not narrated simply to be dismissed, but are indicative of the impact of an alternative reality bumping up against “business as usual” in the pagan world. In this chapter, the exposition of Paul’s encounter with the philosphers on Mars Hill and the uprising in Ephesus are particularly instructive.

The next chapter gives attention to the passages that play well for the traditional reading of Acts. In particular, this chapter, “Dikaios,” chronicles Paul’s trials and vindication before the Roman authorities. This chapter is particularly instructive in the ways that it leads us through the story of Acts as a developing narrative. The trial scenes are not only to be read one by one, but in order, with an eye toward a development in Rome’s response to Paul. Ultimately, Paul’s vindication at the hands of the Romans becomes a tacit confirmation of the “otherness” of the church and its mission–the Romans do not have the epistemological tools to understand the gospel. The resurrection inaugurates a new reality that they cannot grasp.

One of the strengths of Rowe’s approach is that it enables us to step back and see yet another way that Acts depicts the early church as embodying the ministry of Jesus: as he was one in whom the Romans found no guilt, and even at the end pronounced dikaios, just, at his moment of death, and yet was opposed by those who would not accept the transformation of their vision of the kingdom of God, so also goes the church. Yes, Jesus does something new and subversive, but it’s not directly oppositional or antagonistic or seen to be a threat by the Romans (who don’t understand it at all).

In running through some of Rowe’s arguments with a friend who’s working on Acts, he’s wondered if looking to Rome isn’t looking too far afield. Is the purpose of Acts to be found more close to home, in the tensions between the early church and non-Christian Judaism (or even all types of Judaism including the conservative Torah-keeping Judaism with which the non-Jewish church struggles so much)? That’s a question worth pressing further.

Next time I’ll talk about the chapter where Kavin presents his suggestion for reading in light of the tension between collision and innocence and where he goes with the theological implications of his work.

Authenticity Part 3c: Sexuality

January 26, 2010 in Uncategorized with 9 Comments

Ok, you knew this was coming, right?

One of the things that drove me to start reflecting a bit more critically on the issue of sexuality was watching a short video from some homosexual Christians who were reflecting on their experiences growing up in the church. Homosexuals growing up in the church frequently testify to not only the guilt that comes from the preaching against their sexual drives but also to the imprisoning feeling of not being able to authentically express who they are as they strive to live their lives before God. Not acknowledging and living into their homosexual orientation creates an inauthentic experience of not only faith but also life itself.

I think about the issue of homosexuality a good deal (I live in San Francisco, for crying out loud), and I think that some Christian arguments in its favor are stronger than others. The authenticity argument I find to be one of the least compelling.

The reason for this is that in sexuality as much as any other, and more than most other, areas of our lives, the Christian call to live into the righteous life that God desires is a call to set aside what we would otherwise feel like doing.

I recognize that the church as a whole has given up its moral authority to speak on sexual issues. Unlike the church of the prior 1925 years, the church at the middle of the twentieth century became more of a baptizer of the culture’s sexual and marital mores than a missional outpost calling for a counter-cultural way of life. Once we no longer even call people to higher fidelity to their marriage covenant (stay married!) or to confining all sexual expression to marriage, then we’ve lost the moral standing to speak in God’s name about the sorts of sexual relationships God may or may not approve. I can hear one of my readers asking, “Who’s we?” and to this I say: the North American church in general, and the mainline churches in particular.

But having said that, I would say that every call to abstinence or self-control in the area of sexuality, every call to be faithful within a marriage covenant, is at some level a recognition that godly sexuality will at times be an “inauthentic” sexuality. Fully authentic self-expression will often entail sex with a person with whom one is developing an intimate relationship–where there is love. But a married person might develop a strong relationship with someone other than her spouse. Unmarried people will genuinely love the people they are dating.

Authenticity is an insufficient criterion to determine an appropriate expression of sexuality.

If someone is unconvinced that waiting for marriage, or confining sexual expression to marriage (or something like it) is biblical and godly, I suppose I could always bring out more extreme examples such as pedophilia. Is authenticity a sufficient judge to determine godly sexual expression in that case? I don’t want to build my whole case here, because I don’t want my dear readers to think that I can’t tell the difference between consenting, committed adults and the abuse of power, etc. that are entailed in pedophilia. But when we make authenticity our canon, there are ramifications that almost all of us will want to deny.

As I indicated in the first post in this series, I think authenticity is important, even indispensable in Christian communities. But it is not a sufficient rule of practice to tell us either how to act (because we’re being authentic) or how we shouldn’t (because doing a particular action wouldn’t be authentic).

Our rule of life is not who we are, but who we are being made to be in Christ, and the road he has led us on by which to get there: the way of the cross, which is the way of death, which is the formative narrative that determines what our life in community looks like.

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