In the debate about sexuality a comment often heard from the more liberal side is that sexual matters ('sleeping arrangements') are a matter of very small importance compared to the really large issues of injustice and poverty.
The accusation from liberal quarters of the church is that conservatives are obsessed with sex, and that relative to bigger issues sex is unimportant. This is usually accompanied by something about how Jesus doesn't mention sex that much and is more concerned with greed and war etc etc.
But: sex IS important. It is such a crucial and personal feature of human life and identity; and it is such a yardstick for difference between the Christian community and the world around us, and always has been since the earliest days, not true? Sex is not merely a private matter (a Hauerwasian observation): any feminist knows this. (And actually, Christians knew it first).
And, concern for war and greed and sexual behaviour need not be mutually exclusive, surely? And, why is it the conservative side that is 'obsessed' and the liberal side not? Who keeps pushing the issue forward? Who makes an idol of sexual identity such that it trumps unity and biblical teaching?
I am interested not so much in the mud-slinging, as in the 'this is more important than this' argument. Granted, I think there is a critique to be made of an evangelical spirituality that is more concerned with swear-words and tax returns than about global poverty and mega death. This issue is perhaps: where does the ethics of individual personal everyday actions fit in with the so-called 'bigger' issues? And, does the practice of not-swearing, or at least, of keeping language holy (and the practice of chastity for the matter) actually form part of a larger whole?
27 comments:
Conservative Christians at the Anglican Church Synod in Perth recently had to endure the "obsessed with sex" rhetoric. Really annoys me. It's a cheap trick.
Stanley says, quoting a Jewish teacher:
'any religion that doesn't tell you what to do with your genitals and your pots and pans just isn't interesting!'
Oy vai.
Mike,
I've heard the 'sex not important' line too and yes, its bollocks.
On the same sex argument my experience has usually been the reverse - 'I am gay, this is so fundamental to my self identity it trumps anything else you bring up'. Strangely, I haven't spoken with people who start sentences with 'I am heterosecual' 'I am an adulterer' 'I only sleep with my wife'
michael, its rhea. i did a random poll (of husband), and it seems i may have used a swear word in your YOU posts. I won;t repeat it. But i apologise for that. Sorry, and point taken :)
Interesting points though. Somehow the sexually broken need to hear God;s message of reconcilliation. But rarely do they think of the church as a place where that will happen ... and yes to both being important! rhea
Yeah, thanks for your post though Rhea! (I remember meeting you more than once.)
IN fact: swearing is sometimes in context appropriate, isn't it? Well at least, strong langauge is.
I don't personally know a lot of liberals because I was brought up in an evangelical baptist denomination, and the specific Anglican denomination (CESA)that I belong to now is completely evangelical in my country - but just an observation.
It seems to me that there's a disconnect between their spirituality in their private life when compared to the public sphere. So they're keen on the public social issues - but don't start imposing private issues on them, don't tell them that they need to have hetrosexual practices, with one partner, who is their spouse.
Now traditional evangelicals have probably done quite a bit of the opposite too, i.e. the 'its all about me and Jesus and my personal relationship' thing.
Just a guess - but don't we have a God who is concerned from the private and the public?
Well if you consider that humans mutually constitute each other the sexual behaviour has to be the be the fundamental example of this. We come forth from two becoming one!
The 'obsessed with sex' charge is true because the culture in which we live is obsessed with sex. Ironically this is evangelicalism at its most relevant!!!
Social norms and political practices are fashioned in the privacy of one's own home.
I don't know that either conservative or liberals are 'obsessed with sex'- although perhaps if you include sexual roles as 'sex' then i do believe that there can be an unhealthy obsession with this topic -on both sides. The obsession with sex roles seems to get out of proportion. I wish that I could say that there is an unhealthy obsession with poverty in the church but i have never experienced/heard that (and I have pretty much tried every denomination) ... yet.
I think that Spooh, the private/public observation is broadly true.
Perhaps we need to say: what is wrong with being obsessed? We OUGHT to be obsessed!
Well God seems to be pretty concerned with sex. If you have sex with someone you are not married to then you are clearly sinning against God.
My problem is that at a very good evangelical church in Sydanee I have hear quite a lot of good sermons on homosexuality.
This affects some 1% of the population.
I have yet to hear a sermon on adultery, fornication or divorce which affects 50% of the population.
like ordination evangelicals are inconsistent on these issues.
Well I think THAT is evidence of an unhealthy obsession with church politics, not an obsession with sex. Could you talk to the pastor about this and point it out?
Michael, it over two pastors and it is typical of Sydney Anglicans.
No question they are quite correct on homosexuality but they either are too scared to bring up divorce, adulery etc because it actually affects many people or uncomfortable that we don't treat it the same way we treat homosexuality ( as a sin).
Well that's terrible I think. As I say, it is more an obsesssion with politics ... but with such bad effects. And divorce and adultery are HUGE problems too.. of course.
Hi Michael: a belated response to your "straining at gnats" post of last week. I tend to think that where there's smoke, there's fire, but that the fire may not be where everyone's pointing.
One doesn't have to be a liberal to believe that the evangelical church has a problem with sex, and one doesn't even have to disagree with the ethic to believe that. To me, this is a clue that much of the rhetoric is missing the essence of the matter.
In Sydney Anglican circles, one's sexual views and practice tend to serve as a mark of membership of the community, and (our views on assurance to the contrary) there is a prevailing anxiety about being a member in good standing. So in addition to the natural difficulty of the subject, lots of discussions on sexual matters are burdened with a need to reach (and state) the "right answer". In addressing so personal a topic one needs to be sensitive and maintain good humour --- and, dare I say it, to relax a bit --- but this is made very difficult in this environment. It's hard to have a sensible conversation about a shibboleth.
In the Nineties I used to torment clergy friends over sermons on this topic that (I felt) had an air of unreality about them, and one of my preferred weapons was the Coffee Shop Test: that one should not put anything on others' conscience in a sermon or in written form, that one wouldn't say one-on-one to a friend over coffee, while looking them in the eye. Lots of public statements fail that test, and I used to think that following it would make our churches better places, but now I'm not so sure.
You spoke about practice fitting into a "larger whole": I'm many years out of touch now, but it used to be the case that sexual misbehaviour was a big deal for how one was regarded (by oneself and others), whereas merely treating people badly was not. That's a scandal any way you cut it, and if it's this that people are tripping over, maybe we should accept the rebuke, even if we don't accept the analysis.
This is the stage at which I should try to score a cheap point by saying "and anyway, shouldn't it be more about grace", but as mentioned, that would be cheap. The question is how to work it out in practice. I think it's practice rather than doctrine that's the problem here, even if the issue presents otherwise.
Wow, great to hear from you Bruce!
I have read your post carefully and I find it is salutary on many levels. One of the issues for the evangelical community is the neglect of singleness as a vocation/option, for example... the assumption is that marriage is to be the destiny for all.
I liked the Coffee Shop Test: why are you now rethinking it?
Hey Michael. I'm not rethinking the Coffee Shop Test so much as putting it in perspective. It's meant as a heuristic, and relies on our having better moral instincts about our personal conversations than we do about public statements when in-role. I think that's true in general and it makes the test useful, but not a cure-all: it doesn't help someone who is terminally out of touch, or being wilful.
On your other point: to speak frankly, I would actually prefer benign neglect of the place of singleness, if the alternative is incompetent attempts to address it. I have been Christian and (for the most part) single for twenty years, and one of the drawbacks of this has been listening to twenty years' worth of sermons, articles, and advice, overwhelmingly from married people, speaking to my state. A strong sense of absurdity has attended many of these attempts.
I don't believe in any such doctrinaire nonsense as, only the single can speak about singleness, only women can speak on women's issues, and such. But it is a fearful thing to tell someone else their business, from a position of authority, and to miss the point of their situation. We speak of the awesomeness of the burden of expounding Scripture, and so on, but it's easy for this to degenerate into cant: the concern we're speaking of is in one sense rhetorical and remote, while the merely worldly consequences of "saying the wrong thing" (which of course are never on anyone's mind!) can be quite immediate. By contrast ungrounded practical advice is not something we often express pious concern about, although it's just as dangerous spiritually (and liable to go unpunished in the short term).
This last is an issue-behind-the-rhetoric on evangelical treatment of homosexual matters, I think (to return to a topic discussed up-list). Understanding the evangelical position is straightforward enough, but avoiding the charge of presumption when expounding it is much harder. I'd classify a lot of the noise on this subject as a protest against failed attempts. If what we say is to rise above the level of Divine Law prohibition, it at least needs to be animated by a positive alternative vision, and it's not clear to me that we have one. The obvious candidate is wholeness, and a commitment to whatever conduces to (true) human flourishing, but this can be too open-ended and (apparently) indefinite for evangelical taste. However, without this or some better candidate (if there is one), a down-the-line position on homosexual activity is an imposition on a minority, our protestations to the contrary.
A propos of this, have you read Lisa Sowle Cahill's Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (in the New Studies in Christian Ethics series)? She's pleasingly strong on the social dimension, as you might expect from a catholic feminist. Anyway, she sets up a framework not unlike what I mentioned above, and partway through the book makes an effort at application, ending up in a position that's roughly as follows: if we were going to draw a line in the sand about homosexual activity, this is how and why we'd draw it. But she hovers around the edge of this position, and doesn't actually commit to it. I used to find this frustrating, and a cop-out, but on further reflection I'm more positive about it: it at least has the virtue of humility.
In this whole area I think we are often in the situation of knowing (or thinking we know) what the Christian position should be, but not truly knowing what it would be to hold that position fully. I don't see anything intrinsically impossible or wrong about that, but it's contrary to our tastes and habits. I wonder if the message is that some of those tastes need to be mortified, and that it's this (rather than objections to our ethic) that we're guilty of ignoring.
Hi,
I think the coffee shop test is a good one but I also think my pastor would quite happily say a few things directly over coffee to me that a lot of clergy never would. And there I think is another angle on the problem. Maybe we should be prepared to say some of these things over coffee? Perhaps some of our liberal friends think we don't mean it because we are scared to say to them face to face over coffee that we consider them guilty of heresey. Maybe they think it's only pulpit rhetoric?
Nice blog by the way -are you related to the other Jensens?
I surely am!
Let's see if I can make this a shorter post than the last one:
David for me, and for many of the laity I think, "what liberals say" (and how to reply to it) is a distraction. The issue I face day-to-day is the more general one of inhabiting a wider world where the sexual ethics of my friends and colleagues are different, but not non-existent. I have found evangelical rhetoric most unhelpful for navigating this world, and for treating my acquaintance with the respect they deserve: instead we seem fixated on establishing what the Christian sexual ideal is, something I (and many other Christians) don't dispute. But one cannot nourish a life by being defensive about an ideal.
I couldn't agree more with you Bruce...
Hi Michael. Hope you enjoyed the holiday.
Since we're in accord on this, perhaps if I could return to something up-list for a moment: do you happen to have read the Cahill book I mentioned? I first read it years ago when I was somewhat isolated from wider Christian conversation, and found it more helpful --- more fully engaged --- than other things I'd read on the topic. But I'm quite out of touch with which books are doing the rounds these days.
No, I haven't, though my friend Andrew Cameron has read some of her stuff. I must chase it up!
I'm not so sure Evangelicals are doing so bad. Maybe I'm moving in different circles -but when I sit in an Oak Hill lecture there's not much time for mud slinging -I don't believe the homsosexuality debate has come up once (I'm sure we could have managed it at some time in Genesis or Leviticus) There's a concern for the cultural mandate as well as the great commission. I sat in All Souls the other Sunday night -exactly the same. And to be honest I've only probably heard about 5 or 6 sermons on homsexuality in all my life! Even Phillip Hacking took a lot of time pointing to the fact that we mustn't leap on the big sex issue bandwagon when the bible has so much to say about harsh words and hypocrisy. There's a couple of books in the bookshop on the issue. Beyond that, not a lot. Either there are pockets of obsession or we are selling ourselves out to the propaganda. Yes we need to challenge ourselves all the time but I wonder if Evangelicals are really so bad?
Dave I don't know how to sensibly discuss whether "Evangelicals are really so bad" or "doing so bad" (compared to what?).
Nor do I presume to speak on the situation in your church, let alone at Oak Hill. But where I come from, evangelicals have the Anglican church pretty much to themselves (certainly, we have the power) and so evangelical vs liberal polemic can have an aspect of one-sided theatre. Now, that might be a rather specific situation, but even so I am suspicious of evangelical-liberal discussions generally, which is why I bought into this thread. Supposing that there could be a "victory" in such a discussion, one's problems would not suddenly go away. (Sydney is as close to an example of this as one could reasonably ask for.) So to me it makes sense to put the polemic to one side and ask how we are travelling on this issue ourselves, without making invidious comparisons.
I'm not especially comfortable discussing the homosexual controversy at length, for fear of saying something ignorant. But it is universally reported that people with homosexual feelings have a rough time of it in our churches, and that is a problem regardless of the frequency of sermons. I find this plausible because (as I said) I don't think we have a wider theory or vision of sexuality, and prohibitions are arbitrary without such a vision, unless one is intellectually or culturally comfortable with Divine Command. I am not intellectually comfortable with it, and our society in general is not culturally comfortable with it, so to me that adds up to a problem.
Certainly on the single condition, and in what our rhetoric implies about the wider world --- topics I can speak on from some experience --- we are not there yet. (It would be redundant to repeat points I made up-list.) And as mentioned, one of the underlying problems here is an anxiety about boundaries: not a sexual issue in the first instance, and in any case thoroughly worldly.
Wow: once again, much food for thought here B.Y.
Funnily enough if we aren't providing the grand vision of the adventure of the chaste life whether married or single then it is not for lack of resources in the Christian tradition. Of course some of it is not a little problematic! We have perhaps forgotten than in gospel terms both marriage and singleness are divine callings.
Stan Hauerwas has some great stuff on this in his work. He routinely asks young American students from Christian homes why they should get married - and then blasts away at their assumption that what they are responding with is at all Christian!
Well from the discussion elsewhere on your blog I'm sure I'd find Hauerwas insufferable, but that routine you mention does sound kind of fun. I can say that safely, being too old, and the wrong nationality, to ever be on the receiving end of it.
I agree one has to engage with the tradition here: in fact I suspect that this is a large part of the problem. The tradition is a very mixed bag, as you say, and so one has to do serious constructive work if the engagement is to be useful. Without this, I think systematic treatments become shallow (I never managed to finish Grenz's Sexual Ethics: An Evangelical Perspective, for example: a thoroughly disappointing book) but with it, you inevitably take yourself outside the boundaries of the (ungrounded) contemporary discussion.
Cahill does address the tradition (again, as you'd expect from a Catholic feminist and an academic) but I've said enough in her praise already. There's an historical survey by an M.E.Weiser-Hanks, Christianity and sexuality in the early modern world: Regulating desire, reforming practice which I've only managed to dip into so far: I'm no historian, but the "feel" of the book is very sober and sensible; it looks like a good resource, and it's surprisingly readable.
Greetings good people from the increasing spiritual desert that is Perth.
I hope that you're all clear on the motivation behind the Archbishop of Perth's statement. There is more than a touch of hypocrisy about it. He is a very strong supporter of women in all areas of ministry (strangely enough for this position he seems to not be against the idea of lay presidency, but I've not had the chance to actually ask him), and I'm confident he is similarly liberal on the question of homosexuals in the ministry as well. It is a standard comment to represent those with differing opinions as having "a problem", but he is at least as guilty in never missing an opportunity to push and promote the idea of having women wearing mitres. If he really felt it was "unimportant" he wouldn't be pushing as hard for this as he is. As far as I can tell his comments are disingenuous humbug designed to curry favour with fellow travellers, especially in the media. If he really thinks this is important, then he could at least do us all the curtesy of admitting this much and doing some genuine work towards finding some acceptable compromise rather than merely dismissing the other side and pretending that he isn't a protagonist in this dispute. Incidentally, much of the focus of opposition to the gay rights activists in the USA comes from Africa, one of the centres of disadvantage and poverty - clearly the Africans consider this to be an important issue.
You must understand that Peter Carnley was appointed Archbishop at the age of 43, and had authority over Perth for 24 years. The diocese is strongly liberal - so much so I can't think of a remaining traditionalist (evangelical or anglo-catholic) clergyman remaining active. Probably the last was the Reverend Entwistle. A result is that synods over here are often just left liberal talk fests where they can bemoan the "nasty reactionaries" safe in the knowledge that everyone agrees with them. My feeling is that however "dominated" by conservative evangelism Sydney allegedly is, Perth today is totally smothered under a saccharine avalanche which doesn't even allow alternative approaches (hence their attempt to ban associations outside, i.e. with Sydney) despite the fact liberals claim to be the champions of the "broad church" concept. Judging from the vastly different attendance rates between Sydney and Perth, I think liberal advocates should think very carefully about what they mean by inclusion, when it seems far fewer actually want to be "included" over here.
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