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.
“[T]he church at the middle of the twentieth century became more of a baptizer of the culture’s sexual and martial mores than a missional outpost calling for a counter-cultural way of life”
I can think of one Church whose teachings didn’t capitulate to the culture’s sexual mores and truly is counter-cultural, but based comments I’ve heard you make in the past, I doubt you want to hear that.
Oh, and “martial mores”? Everything okay at home? 
Ok, my Freudian slip about the martial condition in the home has been corrected!
By everyone giving in to culture in a way that I’d approve of (as you intimate), do you refer to changes such as positions on birth control?
Naturally (pun intended).
There are tons of churches whose “teachings” haven’t capitulated to anything. But that says nothing about whether or not those churches are forming and leading their members in ways that actually embody those teachings.
On that score I don’t think the Roman church has any more of a leg to stand on than anyone else.
I agree that “authentic” does not equal “let it all hang out.” So then, how then do we live authentically with our sexuality? And how does that fit into the role of a leader in this statement from post 1: “People resonate with leaders who are fellow travelers, people resonate with fellow travelers who are honest about the valleys as well as the peaks”?
Great questions. What do you think?
It probably has something to do with acknowledging that there’s a goal, a telos, and I am not there but we are all on a journey there together.
It probably entails confessing ways that all of us have been complicit in perpetuating the notion that our sexuality is at the heart of our identity (rather than one part of a very complicated whole). It might entail digging through some different forms that sexual dysfunction manifests itself, including the ones that aren’t directly tied to actualized sexual expression.
Those are a few thoughts, but I would seriously be interested in hearing what other folks think on this one. It’s a tough and important question.
I read this whole series after Halden linked to it, though not all the comments on each post, so I apologize if I am repeating any points made elsewhere.
Firstly, nice reflection on the topic. The contrarian in me just likes to see a popular buzzword taken to task a bit.
Authenticity, as you point out is insufficient as a criterion by itself. But that is because authenticity alone doesn’t mean anything. The question is “authentic to what?” A cuisine is “authentic” if it is highly similar to the same kind of food from the region it supposedly represents. A person being “authentic” must be being true to something. The natural assumption is that this is reflexive – we are being “authentic” to ourselves.
But who are we?
Here is where I would probably press you a bit. You present “the human” as fallen and sinful aspiring to a future christlikeness. I think a better presentation, artificially similar, is that in so far as we are fallen and sinful we are inhuman and therefore inauthentic. Jesus is the revelation of the fullness of humanity and as such it is in his person that we can learn who we really are and until we have realized that identity we are always inauthentic, false, unreal.
In essence we would agree that Christ is a necessary ethical criterion for judging our authenticity.
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but I do want to make a couple of points. Of course the Catholic Church’s record on forming people who practice its countercultural sexual ethic is less than stellar, at least in the modern West. (Sadly, in many – though not all – places in the U.S., the RCC hasn’t done much better in practice than the mainline churches Daniel refers to.)
However, I’m a little bit less sanguine about “tons of churches” not capitulating to the culture. Recently we’ve seen the Episcopal Church and the ELCA abandon Scripture and the Tradition in this area, and others, including some in the Evangelical and Emergent camps, seem to be following them like lemmings to the sea. Moreover, it’s not uncommon among Evangelicals to have an “anything goes” attitude to sex, so long as it’s within the confines of marriage. I’m not suggesting this is what Daniel has in mind – I respect him too much to impugn such a base understanding to him. But, as a mutual friend of ours who is in the thick of American Evangelical life puts it, far too many Evangelicals see their spouses, effectively, as their personal p*rn stars, and this falls far short of a biblical and traditional understanding of human sexuality.
It just seems to me if the criterion (“authentic” or “authentically”) is insufficient at any point then to “live authentically with our sexuality,” is mute. To “live authentically” assumes that we know what is best before God. By our own initiative, we make decisions based on our reason (falsely). The implications point to the Garden where relationships begin to “disintegrate.”
Yet, we have Jesus and his reconciling work. So, somehow it must make a difference in our sexual expressions. It has to impact and transform our understanding and practice of what we do with our bodies in the presence of God. Shouldn’t our sexual expression be a response to who God is in the work of Jesus?