Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Sexual Holiness

Jenell Paris has an article that talks about sexual holiness from a protestant perspective.
In the area of sexuality, specifically, morality too easily becomes an idol, whether it’s premarital virginity, marital chastity or heterosexuality. People follow hard after it, measure their worth by it and are sometimes devastated when they offend it. Moreover, Christians teach others to measure their worth by morality rather than by their belovedness. When sexual morality is elevated to an idolatrous place, it diminishes people’s sense of being loved and being able to love, instead of being put in its place by love.
It is hard to think of sexual morality as an idol because the bible so closely associates sexual immorality with idolatry. When Israel worships other gods she is compared to a prostitute or an unfaithful wife. So can worshiping the true God become an idol? Makes no sense. It makes about as much sense as talking about chastity as an idol. Means to the end of holiness can become an idol but holiness itself cannot.
Christians are called to holiness in all areas of life, both personal and corporate. Personal sexual holiness includes how a person cares for his or her sexual feelings, thoughts and actions. My views are conservative—I’m a “sex only within marriage between a man and a woman” kind of Christian—but I am well aware that Christians of good faith disagree about the meaning of personal sexual holiness. Maligning those with whom we disagree, even to the point of questioning the validity of their faith or salvation, is counterproductive and damages the witness of our religion as a whole, which is supposed to be comprised of believers from many times and places united in their devotion to Jesus, not to a set of beliefs about sexuality.
This is classic moral relativism. It even has the self contradictory nature of moral relativism. That is her declaration that "maligning those with whom we disagree" is wrong must also be declared to part of the kind of Christian she is and not something all Christians are bound to. So her maligning the maligners is out of place. She should just say you do that and I don't. Different strokes for different folks. Really it undermines all moral teaching. But she does not want to do that. She only wants to undermine sexual moral teaching. That is what sells. Nobody wants to buy a book that makes murder or theft or lying a matter we just can't agree on. A matter where the real issue is allowing everyone to live out their own diverse ideas of what might be moral. We don't want that in any other area but sex. That is where morals must somehow become wishy-washy.
The world in which Christians all agree about sexual issues is an imaginary one. Love of God and neighbor, the heart of holiness, has to be practiced in the real world in the midst of these disagreements.
Of course we don't agree. But why should holiness depend on agreement? We have one God who is the fountain of all holiness. The fact that we don't agree means we can and do misunderstand God. So we need a trustworthy source of God's truth. Just accepting that everyone has a different version of that truth and assuming our version is fine won't do. We need to find God's word. We can't find it by just looking at our world.

She has a hint when she says "our religion as a whole, which is supposed to be comprised of believers from many times and places united in their devotion to Jesus." Is there any consensus about sexual morality that emerges when you look at such a body of believers? There is. It is more conservative than her “sex only within marriage between a man and a woman” idea. It also rejects contraception and a few other things most protestants accept. So modern sexual morality, even that described as conservative, is very liberal when looking at all of Christianity. That is what " is counterproductive and damages the witness of our religion as a whole."
When the Holy Spirit (or a particular representation of the Holy Spirit) is emphasized to the exclusion of Christ, sexual holiness can be misconstrued as whatever seems right or feels right to a person. On the other hand, when Jesus (or a particular representation of Jesus) is emphasized over the Holy Spirit, Christians can coerce themselves and others into behavioral compliance with Jesus’ moral teachings to the neglect of cultivating personal spirituality and conscience.
Costly discipleship avoids, on the one hand, cheap grace that permits moral excess and, on the other hand, rigid moralism that occludes mercy and joy.
I am not sure how she avoids moral excess here. What would moral excess look like? But what I find interesting is that a moral problem immediately becomes a theology problem. She has Jesus and the Holy Spirit working against each other. She has personal spirituality and moral compliance as opposites as well. The essence of heresy is to over-emphasize one truth use it to defeat other truths.
The “end” of a holy life is to be like Christ. When it comes to sexual holiness, however, the end is often misperceived as a life station (heterosexual marriage) instead of a quality of life (Christlikeness). For some, marriage is not a viable or even a desirable state.
She has a point here. Many Christians think sexual morality is about remaining a virgin until your wedding day. There is a lot more to it than that. It is about having a pure heart in a world that worships filth. But how can you tell what is pure if you embrace relativism? If you are going to order your life around purity you need to know for sure what is Godly and what is a distortion. Relativism gives you nothing but questions. It attacks the solid answers you might not like but you end up with nothing solid left. Just warm fuzziness like "follow your heart" or "have a Christ-like quality of life."

I have not  read her whole book but she seems to have enough hints here that she is going to cave in on the gay issue. The code words are all there. Even the use of the phrase "heterosexual marriage" like there is another kind of marriage.

The book is published by InterVarsity Press. I thought they were more solid than this. The scary part is that most college students, both protestant and Catholic, are not going to be able to tell this from more traditional Christianity. They are going to be able to tell the final answers are different but many will be unclear on exactly where she went wrong.

11 comments:

  1. Your last few paragraphs reminded me of a overall powerful article I saw the other day, you might enjoy it too: Abstinence Is Death.

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  2. It is an interesting article. The world tends to evaluate a person's sex life (and sometimes even their entire life!) by how often they engage in the marital act. To some extent Christians buy into that and argue you will have more sex and better sex if you marry and be faithful. On a purely physical basis that is often true but not always. But should we evaluate our sex lives on a purely physical basis?

    Abstinence is death in the sense that all paths lead to death. Holiness leads us to our cross. Sin leads us to death another way. But the death of holiness leads to resurrection. That is true is we choose forgiveness over anger. It is true if we choose integrity over lying. It is also true if we choose purity over lust.

    The trouble I have with the abstinence case is that the resurrection does not always lead to sex. You might be called to celibacy. Even within marriage the new life and joy might not be in the form of a physical sex act. So the word seems to leave the focus on the physical.

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  3. The astonishing thing was that this was written by a Protestant professor. Granted, he is a popular blogger precisely because he is always trying to be out of the ordinary on his views.

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  4. Nobody wants to buy a book that makes murder or theft or lying a matter we just can't agree on. A matter where the real issue is allowing everyone to live out their own diverse ideas of what might be moral. We don't want that in any other area but sex. That is where morals must somehow become wishy-washy.

    I'd disagree here, most polotics is precisely determining what is moral in areas other than sex. Take energy policy for example.... we have desire for 4 moral traits:

    a) We want cheap energy (frugality, pro-life)
    b) We want a safe energy (good shepherd)
    c) We want domestic energy (aversion to war)
    d) We want stable production of energy (feeding the poor)

    Every source of energy we have is bad on at least one of these 4 criteria. So how best to prioritize them. That's ultimately a moral choice and we all know that people don't agree and we don't expect them to agree.

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  5. The point is we agree that these are all moral goods. How we weigh them in relation to each other is another question. But we don't say aversion to war is something that might be a moral good for you but you should not act like it is an absolute moral good. People don't go there. If we think not everyone shares our moral aversion we are likely to get more politically active and not less. We want to prevent society from going down an immoral path. Then when we talk about sex we switch gears and say morality is personal and does not belong in public policy discussions.

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  6. I see your point. Let me give you a few others that people disagree are moral goods vs. their negative

    1) Expressing your emotions or feelings, being self expressed.
    2) Encouraging experimentation with different ways of life or values
    3) Belief in a divine plan vs., belief in fate vs. belief in the ability to control outcomes.
    4) Therapeutic vs. punitive view of justice.
    5) Censorship of ideas particularly those seen as damaging to a society
    6) Connecting the emotionally troubling to the morally wrong (is it immoral to eat dog, or just offense to westerners).
    7) Subversion of questionable authorities.

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  7. Interesting examples. These would be areas where there is some Christian tradition on both sides. OK, #2 might not be depending on what we are talking about but the values that would be strongly rejected would typically involve some from of sexual immorality. So you are right that not all moral questions are dealt with in a dogmatic way (no pun on #6!). But the difference between dogmatic moral teaching and what we would call matters of prudence and judgement comes from the nature of the teaching. Some teaching carries strong authority and some is more material for reflection. Catholics have this difference in authority worked out quite precisely. Protestants have a philosophical weakness on the question of authority. That is one reason why Jenell Paris' arguments are harder to answer for evangelicals.

    I do still think these kinds of arguments are almost exclusively dragged out for sexual issues. Not the idea that some moral questions are not dogmatic but the idea that none of them are. The moral principle that says moral principles are wrong. Maybe I don't get out much but I don't see those sweeping statements. In some ways it is the nuclear weapon of moral reasoning. It destroys all morals arguments including itself. It is used when conventional weapons are sure to fail.

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  8. I don't actually know anyone who believes that moral principles are wrong. Everyone has moral principles and I think in fact mostly they are pretty close on moral principles. They disagree quite a bit on prioritizing between them and matters of fact.

    I agree sex is a focus. Sex is an area where Christian morality is rather strict, and church focus is rather high. Also everyone directly has to make sexual choices. Sex is also one of those moral areas where the dominant morality since the enlightenment and actual human behavior diverge quite sharply. So we've had centuries of huge arguments on the topic. I'd probably concur it is the most controversial area.

    At the same time other areas like wealth distribution are pretty big moral areas which also have had passionate arguments for essentially all of human history.

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  9. I don't actually know anyone who believes that moral principles are wrong

    People make the argument all the time. Jenell Paris makes it in this article. Pro-choice people make it all the time. Don't like abortion? Don't have one. What is the argument? All morality is personal likes and dislikes. There are no moral principles. Do people believe it? Who knows? It is self-contradictory. But moral arguments along those lines are common as dirt. About as valuable too.

    I agree sex is a focus. Sex is an area where Christian morality is rather strict, and church focus is rather high.

    I don't think the church focuses on sex. At least not in my parish. Given the seriousness of the sins and the number of people struggling with them they hardly mention it at all. I think society is focused on sex. Mostly because people feel guilty. They like to blame the church but it is their own conscience that tells them they are doing wrong.

    At the same time other areas like wealth distribution are pretty big moral areas which also have had passionate arguments for essentially all of human history.

    You think so? I think wealth distribution is a pretty recent phenomenon. People have said helping the poor is good and occasionally someone did that to a significant degree but they were the exceptions. Mostly wealth distribution didn't get serious until democracy came on the scene.

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  10. Hi Randy --

    Good answers.

    Pro-choice people make it all the time. Don't like abortion? Don't have one. What is the argument? All morality is personal likes and dislikes.

    Good example, that is a tough one. I would hope that this is not an argument from moral relativism since obviously that would be a stupid argument. Rather it is a more subtle argument along these lines:

    1) Consent is the driving principle of sexual morality.
    2) Abortion should be classified along with sexual morality and not a crimes of violence.
    c) An objection to abortion is just an objection to consenting to have an abortion.

    Now obviously (1) and (2) are highly contentious and most people making this argument often haven't really thought through those two underlying assumptions. (2) is the reason that discussion of the fetus' development is so effectual in pro-life arguments because once one accepts that abortion is the deliberate dismemberment of proto-human, (2) is a harder belief to defend. Were pro-choice people really consistent moral relativists (in the very strong sense you are using it here, and not in something like the Hegelian sense) then fetal development would be irrelevant and unconvincing.

    Given the seriousness of the sins and the number of people struggling with them they hardly mention it at all.

    I just want to point out the "seriousness of the sins" is precisely what I mean by a high degree of church focus. The fact that they are considered to be serious sins... I understand your objection that you don't think the church is aggressive enough on these issues ...

    Mostly because people feel guilty. They like to blame the church but it is their own conscience that tells them they are doing wrong.

    I don't see that. I think the data on premarital sex being wrong, homosexual sex being wrong, masturbation being wrong is pretty clear that huge and growing percentages of the population simply aren't troubled by these sexual acts.

    You think so? I think wealth distribution is a pretty recent phenomenon.

    I think we mentioned this before on the rise of Islam and how important the end of debt and slavery was. That's a great example. Going back even further Book IV of the Republic discusses the distribution of property and how this effects the nature of the good. The old testament specifically outlines the the corners of fields are community property though the interior is private property.

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  11. I responded here with a new post.

    http://www.ephesians4-15.blogspot.ca/2012/05/discussion-with-cd-host.html

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