Taking hold of the far-reaching implications of Jesus’ restoration project is something I continually harp on because it can play an important role in transforming the posture with which we hold the gospel.

My experience within evangelical Christian circles has often been one in which followers of Jesus envision themselves as the small, minority truth-holders, struggling to cling to what it right, and ever cautious and even fearful about fully engaging in other “worlds” that might be tainted by godlessness, or liberalism, or the like (since those to are “alike,” right?! *ahem*).

Image: markuso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last night I had the opportunity to participate on a panel that was responding to questions posed by a group of college students. We fielded questions such as, “What are Christians supposed to do about evolution, especially science majors?” “What should Christians think about environmentalism?” “What about people who never hear the message of Jesus?”

The questions are important ones in many respects. But the overall sense I got from the questions was that Christian faith is a small fortress to be guarded carefully. And I wondered if we didn’t need to start reimagining a capacious vision of the reign of God as our gospel.

I think the problem of a small, carefully guarded fortress starts early. In youth group we learn that the gospel means: (1) Jesus died for your sins; (2) you shouldn’t sleep with your boyfriend or girlfriend; and (3) drinking is bad.

There’s not much good news in that, except in the hope that if you can control your hormones you get to be with Jesus drinking grape juice one day.

But what if we begin, instead, with, “God was, in Christ Jesus, reconciling all things to himself”?

Then the world of nature and science does not stand as a looming threat to our faith, but as a witness to the breadth of the saving care of God.

Then the preservation of the environment becomes not merely a fleeting liberal hobby-horse, but a crucial pillar in the eternal plan of God. You think you care about the environment? Well, you’ve got nothing on the creator.

Maybe even questions about sex and sexuality can be received, gratefully, as gifts, rather than fearful lands to be trod, if at all, with extreme caution.

Paul talks about the reception of the Spirit as a transforming moment that moves us from slavish fear to the freedom of the glory of the children of God. It moves us into the realm where we know ourselves to be members of God’s family and instruments in the turning of the ages.

Posture, it seems to me, is as important as details. If we cannot posture ourselves with arms wide open to the cosmos that God has reconciled to himself, then we are not so positioned as to come to faithful answers to the questions that plague us. And we might not even be in the position to be plagued by the right questions.

Your sexuality is a part of who you are, but you are more than the complex of desires, experiences, abuses, successes, fulfillments, frustrations, satisfactions, brokenness, wholeness, sinfulness, and fidelity that pertain to your sexuality.

Jenell William Paris thinks that an uncritical acceptance of the notion of sexual identity is at the core of the church’s problems in its thinking about sex. In her book, The End of Sexual Identity, Paris uses her training as an anthropologist to help us step back and see that the ways we so easily fall into talking and thinking about sexuality are culturally conditioned. And in this case, the church has too readily adopted our culture rather than creatively developing a more healthy and holy Christian counter-culture.

In laying out the problems with sexual identity, Paris begins with the troubles with heterosexuality.

There are several problems with the idea of heterosexuality. One of these is that it presumes a binary of homosexual / heterosexual, whereas the range of human sexual desire falls along a continuum with several intermediate stages between.

A further problem is that this binary has a particular function. It was created, in the past one hundred years, as a way to distinguish what was labelled “deviant” behavior from “normal” desires and behavior. Thus, it was created to be a label that communicates moral superiority.

This last point has a further implication: the idea of “being” homosexual or “being” heterosexual is new–and is therefore an anachronistic grid for reading scripture. More importantly, it elevates an identity based on sexual feelings to a place that scripture assigns to our belovedness by God.

Who are you? The answer to this question should not be, “heterosexual,” and therefore beloved of and faithful to God; instead, it should be, “beloved of God.” Once we cling to heterosexuality as our identity marker, we then create communities where this is required to the extent that we are not able to tell honest stories of struggle–or of grace.

The book offers a pervasive dismantling of simplistic assumptions about sexuality. In her chapter on homosexuality, Paris reminds us that there are different ways to configure homosexual activity. Though we base the label on desire for a same-sex relationship among equals, in the ancient world there were age and power dynamics that sustained homosexual activity; others who engage in same-sex sex might do so for professional reasons: in some cultures religious reasons in others as professional entertainers or prostitutes.

In place of sexual identity, Paris advocates that we strive for sexual holiness within our fundamental identity as God’s beloved children. Sexual holiness will wrestle with issues of behavior, desire, hopes, histories, choices, relationships, and others as well.

With such a reconfiguration, we are faced with two important outcomes: (1) sexual identity does not become an identity marker for the people of God such that we exclude, include, divide, and the like based on the category of sexual desire; and (2) we are freed to respond to one another, and grow in community together, as people who are all in some ways more and in some ways less healthy, holy, broken, whole, sinful, and faithful in different aspects of our sexuality.

Put differently: if we could stop acting like calling ourselves “heterosexual” meant that we were sexually whole and holy, our sexuality could become a growing and more healthy component of our identity as God’s beloved children in Christ.

Who should read this book? Pretty much everyone. If I were a campus minister, I would read this with my leadership groups, and then have my small groups study it. I think all youth pastors should read this so that they can start thinking about how to transform the minds of their students. I think all pastors should read this so that they can help their churches avoid the pitfalls of reifying notions of identity that cut against the grain of biblical descriptions of identity and wholeness.

I think you should read this so that you can help me continue to think through the issues Paris raises and how her insights clear the way for a better way forward as Christians who celebrate sex as a gift given to us by God and yet have found it very difficult to integrate sexuality into our understanding of our selves as those beloved children of God who were created good, but have fallen, and are now being restored in Christ.

• A friend Tweets connects with an old friend, who saw Christian indications on my friend’s FB profile and asked right off the bat, “What do you think about gay people?” The old friend is gay.
• A church that does not participate in the Christian right is disturbed at the villainizing of LBGT folks coming from Christian quarters. It does not support Prop 8. It wants to be welcoming, but theologically is not affirming.
• An academic institution that holds to a traditional sexual ethic of sex only within male-female marriage nevertheless wants to live up to its ideals of academic integrity by fostering open conversation about issues pertaining to homosexuality.

So here’s the question: to what extent can the desires of an individual, church, or other Christian institution be met to create a welcoming, loving, and challenging environment for members of the LBGT community without affirming the expression of such sexualities out of hand?

I suppose that’s a two part question: Is it even possible? If so, what does it look like? Is it easier on an individual level than on an institutional level? For those of you who identify as LBGT, will these kinds of attempts to create welcoming space without being affirming simply ring hollow, or is there something in the efforts or results that you would be or are appreciative of?

Thus far on my blog I have been very proud of the way that we have been able to have difficult conversations with a relative level of respect. Let’s keep that up. I know that these are difficult topics–for folks who are affirming and see this as a justice issue in which others are perpetuating injustice and discrimination, for folks who are holding to an understanding of male/female only sex within marriage and see this as an issue of biblical authority and submission to God.

Thanks for being willing to enter into these highly charged waters without attempting to electrocute those who disagree with you!

Now to the question: is it possible to be welcoming without being entirely affirming? If so, what does that look like?

Reading through the Jesus narratives in particular, I find that he seemed to care about a number of other markers of fidelity to himself and the God of Israel, and in addition that sins of sexual commission were less likely to keep someone from the Kingdom of God than sins of religious power abuse, hypocrisy and the like.

But then there I go reading through Acts, and there’s this huge meeting in Jerusalem to figure out what the non-Jews have to do if they want to be faithful adherents to the way of Jesus. No, they don’t have to bear the unbearable yoke of Torah. No, they don’t have to become Jews by practice and ethnic affiliation. No, they don’t have to be circumcised.

What, then, will mark out the non-Jewish adherents of The Way if not the Law of God?

In essence: refraining from participation in idolatrous worship. And being sexually pure. No meat sacrificed to idols, and refraining from sexual immorality.

Perhaps I oversimplify. They are also to stay away from blood and strangled meat. If I may be permitted to riff a bit on this conglomeration, using other NT writers, the early church is depicted here as having a concern with how we are joined to the lives of gods, of other people, and of animals.

Having received life from the true and living God, we do not feed on the life-giving stuff marked out by and for other gods. We do not drink the life of animals and so become unnaturally one with them. We do not join ourselves to anyone other than a spouse because we are joined to them by physical union, and to the church by our union with Christ.

And, refusing to be profligately joined to other people in sexual unions marks the people of the Jesus way as distinct from the outside world. Though we err when we seem to make this a sufficient condition for Christian piety, it is a necessary one–and one that distinguished ancient Christians from the world around them as much as it would distinguish us from the world around us if we had the courage to live up to it.

So I will not be able to join the chorus of those who say that God is not so petty as to be concerned with what goes on behind our closed bedroom doors. Much the opposite, I will need to say that because the creation is good, because sex is good and sex is a gift, God cares tremendously about how we use it.

And walking in sexual purity is one defining marker of the people of God.

More recently, I have been working in two areas at once. On the one hand, I have been teaching a class on the cross in the New Testament. Part of this course is working through various models of the atonement, studying how they conceive of the problem of sin and how Jesus’ death provides the solution.

On the other hand, I have been writing about sex and homosexuality for my book on Jesus and Paul. Doing this, I was struck by the way that much contemporary conversation about sexuality has distanced sexual practice from something that might be labeled “sinful” (except in cases of rape, pedophilia, etc.).

And so studying sexuality reaffirmed to me the importance of what I learned in talking to my colleagues and in studying atonement theories: In order to articulate a Christian position on any issue, including sex, we have to work with multiple metaphors.

When we look at atonement theories, these are some of the things we hear:

1. The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many. “Ransom” language imagines us as enslaved to a hostile power.
2. By His stripes we are healed. “Healing” language imagines us as wounded or broken and in need of mending.
3. Blood poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. “Forgiveness” language imagines us as guilty.

I think the point is this: we are doing well in evangelicalism these days spreading our wings and attempting to fly with a broader array of images about atonement. This opens the door for us to recognize more broadly the effects of sin and thereby celebrate more fully the redeeming work of Christ that delivers us from all sin’s effects. He frees us from our slavery. He heals us from our brokenness. He forgives us for our sins.

But once we’ve so expanded our vision of what living in a sinful world entails, we are confronted simultaneously with the various ways that we need all of Christ in every area of our lives.

If we have anger problems, that not only means we have guilt in our anger that needs to be forgiven, but likely some brokenness in our way of responding to the world and woundedness in our hearts that need to be healed before we can respond to our world with grace and patience. Moreover, if we have such a problem there is a power working to enslave us to this sinful passion from which we need to be freed.

And so I make the modest suggestion that when we deal with sex as a particular issue, we must anticipate that we will see evidence of sinful expressions that need to be forgiven, seemingly inescapable desires from which we need to be freed, and driving forces in broken and wounded hearts and bodies that need to be healed.

To claim that God is not concerned with what we do sexually is to revert to an insufficiently physical gnosticism. To cordon off sex from the realm of our humanity possibly marred by sin is to insufficiently recognize both the need for and extent of Christ’s atoning work.

Since moving to San Francisco two years ago, I have had and/or overheard several times over the same conversation about sex. The story goes something like this.

Context: San Francisco is the most single city in the U.S.

Characters: people who want to have sex, but are reticent to commit to marriage and/or long-term dedicated relationships.

Further implication for context: people are very lonely.

Plot: a quest for significant companionship. But this takes place through numerous sexual encounters that never lead to the desired end, leaving people as lonely and sometimes feeling more guilty than they had.

And, the most interesting thing to me is that I have heard this plot narrated as the story of traditional Christian communities / churches that are advocating sex within marriage as God’s plan for humanity and as the story of gay men in San Francisco. Two groups that would seem to be on opposite “extremes” of our culture’s understanding of sex are, in essence, playing the same script. And both are finding that it does not lead to the plot resolution they’re hoping for.

This highlights for me what is, perhaps, the most significant element of the Christian narrative of sex, and where the marriage analogy of Ephesians 5 gives us the severe grace of a call to repentance.

1. Self-giving Love

Ephesians 5 holds together Christ’s self-giving love on behalf of the church with the self-giving love that should define marriage in general and the sexual relationship in particular. When it invokes the creation narrative, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,” Ephesians 5 invites us to read and understand creation light of the story of redemption. That latter story is one of self-sacrificial love for the good of the other. The Christian story is cruciform, and Christian sex, too, must be cruciform.

This is where the issue of fidelity, of single-minded sexual oneness, comes to the fore. The pursuit of alternative partners beyond the one to whom we’ve clung to denies the story we claim as our own inasmuch as it makes us self-seekers of our own good, our own fulfillment, our own pleasure, at the expense of the other. This inverts the story of the cross. “Open marriage” is incompatible with the story of self-giving love.

I do realize that I’ve jumped from sex to marriage. I suppose I should apologize, and if there are dissenters out there I’m sure I’ll be charged with equivocating. But for all that our ideas of marriage are thoroughly modern and often assumed when we come to the text rather than being read out of it, I can’t get around the idea that marriage is the closest thing we have to creating a context that accurately narrates this story of complete self-giving.

What I’m getting at is this: the call for an “all-in” giving of ourselves is variously appropriate in different contexts. We give ourselves differently to people with whom we are in different relationships. Giving ourselves sexually to someone is a statement with our body that we are giving ourselves to them entirely. The Christian tradition has rightly insisted that if you aren’t willing to say to everyone as long as you both shall live, that such physical expression is a lie.

It’s probably important to say that sex isn’t the only way we can be inappropriately close to someone of the opposite gender. I know a guy who was best friends with a woman he wasn’t particularly interested in dating. The relationship developed an intimacy that was communicating to the woman a level of intimacy he wasn’t ready to stand by and express in other areas. That was a selfish use of a relationship.

Once upon a time I was at a men’s breakfast, and the pastor who was speaking encouraged us to process our responses to women using this grid: When you’re thinking about that woman, are you desiring her for your glory, or are you desiring God’s glory in and for her? If you can overlook the echoes of John Piper, that question can be a significant pointer toward which narrative we’re living out in our sex: either the world’s usually self-serving narrative of lust that seeks my own good even if, at times, at the expense of the other; or, the Christian narrative of self-giving love that seeks the other’s good even if, at times, at the expense of my own.

2. Union with Christ

Besides pragmatics and extrapolations, is there really any good reason to think that God wants sex to be reserved for one person to whom we are joined for life? (Or, if you prefer to build your theology from pop culture: Is Avatar right, that those who are best in tune with the world in which we’re created should mate for life?!) I do think so.

The union that we experience in sex is itself likened to the union we experience with Christ by the Spirit. Sex is an experience that joins us to another, changing both of our identities as we become one with the other. This is why Paul tells the Corinthians to guard against sexual immorality. Being joined “outside of Christ” means taking away the members of Christ and making them members of a prostitute.

It is not just official marriage ceremonies that make people “one flesh”–that is the function of sex itself.

The Christian story of salvation is one of being joined to another’s body, the body of the dead and risen Jesus. The “mystery” of sex, as articulated in Ephesians 5, is that an analogous kind of union is formed between sexually joined bodies on earth. The rich interplay between the God who is faithful to Israel like a husband, and the God who hates divorce, the Christ who gives up his body for his bride and calls the church to live in self-giving faithfulness, means that our sexual relationships provide a glimmer of the Christian story to those with eyes to see. We are joined to a body, we are one, to undo the union is to cut off the members of Christ. Am I talking about sex or marriage or salvation or church? Yes. That’s how sex works within the Christian story.

3. What is Suffering?

A few weeks ago I got to listen in on some thoughts on what God is up to in the world from Christians in New York City. They were wrestling with the question of what the story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and glory has to do with their professional and personal pursuits. One woman volunteered this: Maybe suffering for the Kingdom, dying with Jesus, looks like being committed to a place.

Commitment as participating in the narrative of the self-giving messiah? That sounds like the gospel to me. Replace “place” with “person,” and I think we’re up against the scandal of Christian sex that the world (inside and outside the church!) is so reluctant to hear: even sex is a realm within which we are called to deny ourselves. Even sex is a realm within which we are called to commit. Even sex is a realm over which the crucified Christ reigns–and in which he invites us to live out a paradoxically life-giving narrative.

Can greater life come from greater self-denial? Can greater glory come from walking the way of the cross? Do we believe that the crucified Christ is the resurrected Lord over all?

The first thing that comes to mind is that Christians are too minimalist when it comes to sex. It seems that the only thing(s) we have to say is that sex is for marriage and that you should marry only x type of person (e.g.: Christian, opposite gender, etc.).

Once upon a time I was candidating for a job at a church where most of the people were single young professionals. I preached, using illustrations about sex/ how we think about sex a few times. Some of the feedback I got was, “Doesn’t he know we’re all single? Why talk that much about sex?” To which my reply was something along the lines of, “The rest of the world you inhabit is not waiting until you get married to form your expectations and desires concerning sex. The “renewing of our minds” should start long before pre-marital counseling.

But the other, more pervasive thought I had was that most of our thoughts about marriage and sex are insufficiently Christian. And by this I mean what I always try to mean when I level such critiques here on my blog: that the story of Jesus life, death, and resurrection insufficiently shapes our understanding of what loving neighbor looks like when said neighbor is a person toward whom we feel (or might be tempted to feel) some sort of sexual attraction.

Put differently: is there a positive, Christian framework of sexuality that might push us toward not only the gold-metal platform of “abstinence before marriage” but also heartfelt faithfulness within marriage, fidelity to our marriage vows, heartfelt revulsion toward pornography, and effectual opposition to sex trafficking?

Yes, I believe there is. It begins with the common Christian starting point of Ephesians 5: “Love your wives as Christ loved the church,” but recognizes this as part of a larger “narrative spirituality of the cross“: a cross-shaped calling that stories all of the Christian life.

More on this tomorrow.

The article makes some very good points about the dilemmas posed by professional sports. Of course, none of the data or incidents pointed up in the article will surprise us.

In the U.S. we glory most in a sport (football) notorious for leaving its competitors in chronic pain for the rest of their lives, and for the lingering brain damage left by hard hits leading to concussions.

The business demands victory at any cost, such that the baseball doping scandals and video taping of opponents’ sidelines are little more than the assumed consequences of sport. (Did you notice how the SF Giants held onto Barry Bonds just long enough to milk his historic run, then dropped him like a hot potato–and how MLB did nothing about his obvious dependence on performance enhancing drugs while he was making it money hand over fist? This from the sanctimonious people who won’t have anything to do with Pete Rose?!)

Whether it’s violence, money, or the debaucherous lifestyles of athletes that we fund not only by our consumption of their talents but also through our hanging on every aspect of their lives through sports journalism, sports culture creates a counter-narrative to the gospel that we too often simply consume rather than subjecting to redemption or rereading in light of the gospel. This is the point that the article makes with great clarity.

Here’s the paragraph I’m thinking of:

Variously described by those inside and outside as narcissistic, materialistic, violent, sensationalist, coarse, racist, sexist, brazen, raunchy, hedonistic, body-destroying, and militaristic, big-time sports culture lifts up values in sharp contrast with what Christians for centuries have understood as the embodiment of the gospel. There are simply no easy, straight-faced, intellectually respectable answers for how evangelicals can model the Christian narrative—with its emphases on servanthood, generosity, and self-subordination—while immersed in a culture that thrives on cut-throat competition, partisanship, and Darwinian struggle.

I don’t think that there are easy answers here. I’m not in favor of withdrawing from society simply because society offers a powerful counter-narrative to the gospel of Christ crucified.

But neither do I buy the arguments of the rejoinders. One rejoinder indicated that the article was in danger of gnosticism in its denial of the body and its participation in sport. I think that the danger is actually quite the opposite: we  show a gnostic tendency in our willing participation in body (and soul!) destroying sports because we evangelicals tend to think that the body is inconsequential to a person’s relationship with God (so long as you’re not having sex with anyone other than your spouse).

What might it look like to renarrate the story of sports such that it participates in the narrative of the world turned upside down by the saving work of Jesus (rather than renarrating what it means to be a Christian so that we can consume what our neighbors are consuming without thinking twice about it)? That’s a real question. I’d love any thoughts you have. Or maybe you don’t think that such a retelling of the culture’s sports story is necessary at all?

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.