‘Sodomy’, celebrating the Eucharist, and other disgusting acts
One evening few weeks ago I tried out the perspective I have been developing over the past couple of years on a Christian ethics of sexuality on a lay audience for the first time (previously, I’ve aired it before academics and/or ministers); the general response was pleasingly positive, but, inevitably, there were folk who were not prepared to travel with me. One stood up to ask a question. ‘Dr Holmes [always a bad sign], what we are talking about here is sodomy. Do you not find sodomy disgusting when you think, when you really think, about what people are doing?’ Now, it was news to me that we were talking about sodomy: I’d talked a lot about marriage, a bit about fallenness, quite a bit about love, and a lot about asceticism, nothing that I could recall about anal intercourse; nonetheless I tried to respond. I commented that, if surveys are to be believed, many gay couples (and, surely, virtually all lesbian couples) never engage in anal intercourse, whilst a fair number of straight couples do. I further offered the comment that I don’t actually spend a lot of time ‘thinking, really thinking’ about what other people do in (or indeed out of) bed; I didn’t quite say that if the questioner did, then he might need some psychological help, but the implication was there (which I regret). I was taken aback by the question (and indeed the language) and didn’t handle it well. As a result it has stayed with me; what would a good answer have looked like? I now think that this question, whilst extreme and offensively-phrased, is indicative of a very common pattern in Christian debates about sexuality, and so worth reflecting on seriously in public. The basic falsehood at the heart of it, formalised, is something like this: Gay/lesbian couples are/do X Straight couples are not/don’t do X X is disgusting/abnormal/against Scripture/… therefore gay/lesbian couples are morally beneath straight couples. Anal intercourse isn’t it, but let us assume that there is in fact at least one X for which 1. and 2. are true; what of the rest of the argument? In the conversation I have related, I offered the standard ‘liberal/affirming’ way of refuting it, which is to refuse 3: there is nothing disgusting/immoral about anal intercourse, or X, whatever X may be. Now, in this, I over-reached myself: I do not have any views on the morality of anal intercourse as an act. I have never considered the question at all; it is far from obvious to me that it is self-evidently disgusting or immoral; but I could easily be wrong about this. (Obviously the issue is different from a Catholic perspective, where every particular sexual act should be open to the possibility of procreation; the Protestant position, to which I hold, is merely that every particular sexual relationship should be open to the possibility of procreation, so individual sexual acts need not be.) Somewhere near the heart of the arguments that I am trying to construct about sexuality, however, is a belief that this is the wrong response; to say that a particular act of anal intercourse, or any other particular act, is immoral is not wrong; what is wrong is the smuggled premise in my argument above: 3′. Y, which straight couples are/do instead of X is not disgusting/abnormal/against Scripture/… That is, my questioner’s argument depended not just on a claim that anal intercourse is self-evidently disgusting, but on a claim that vaginal intercourse is self-evidently not disgusting. Moving from the cultural category of disgust to the ethical category of immorality, the claim is something like: ‘acts of anal intercourse are immoral; acts of vaginal intercourse are moral’. Thus stated the claim is clearly false: there are many acts of vaginal intercourse that are profoundly immoral (rape; adultery; …). So we need to refine the claim to something like ‘at least some acts of vaginal intercourse are moral’. This, however, is also clearly false. East of Eden, every human desire is distorted, and so every human act is immoral – this is Augustine, straightforwardly. And this is not true just of sexual acts, but of all acts. When I celebrate the Eucharist, or preach evangelistically, my motives are mixed and warped, and so my actions are less than perfect, and so immoral – disgusting in the sight of God. As a recent Pope (if memory serves) had it, ‘not only my worst sins, but my most fervent prayers, stand in need of Christ’s forgiveness’. Everything we do is morally compromised; we cannot single out anal intercourse – or anything else – as being peculiarly morally compromised. Now, there is one further...
Read MoreWhy TED talks are far less interesting than revival sermons
I like good oratory. I teach public speaking regularly. I source and buy or download examples of great (imho…) examples of the genre, from business, politics, cinema, and the church. I watch the best of them over and over, making notes on why they work. I go over videos almost frame-by-frame with classes and seminars, pointing out this hand-movement, that inflection, the use of eyes, the deployment of silence, and of course two dozen or more classical rhetorical techniques, which I name easily in Greek and English. I like good oratory. A while ago, at a dinner party, the conversation turned to TED talks. I admitted, truthfully, that I have never yet watched to the end of one. It turned out that another guest was VP of a firm that sponsored one of the regional conferences, and so the conversation became slightly awkward… …I remember, however, not so much the awkwardness as the realisation. It had not occurred to me until I said it over that table, but it is the case that I have never yet watched to the end of a TED talk. I’ve begun to watch several dozen – over a hundred perhaps. I’ve learnt from many of them. In several cases I’ve bought the speaker’s book. But I’ve always clicked the close button before the presenter received her/his applause. On reflection, this is odd. I like good oratory. I study good speakers obsessively, watch them repeatedly, pause the video, go in slow-mo, rewind, replay. But every TED talk I have clicked on, I have clicked off soon afterwards. This week I tripped over an NYT op-ed entitled The Church of TED, proposing that TED talks are the revivalist sermons of yore. This made me think again of my awkward conversation. I have heard and analysed great revivalist sermons; they are a world away from what I see on the TED video streams. When I teach public speaking, I stress one point regarding purpose: the stand-up monologue is, demonstrably, a fairly poor way of communicating information. It excels as a way of communicating vision. To use the form effectively, the speaker should not aim at the mind, but at the heart. A good set-piece speech is not about changing ideas, it is about changing desires. All of this is extensively demonstrated in the literature on public speaking. Of course, this makes sense of preaching. When I speak to experienced preachers I ask them to summarise the message of their last sermon in one sentence (if it was a well-constructed sermon, they will have done this before starting to write it of course). Then I ask them to estimate how many of those who heard the sermon would not have already known that idea. 5% is rare; 10% almost vanishingly so. Preachers repeat endlessly truths their congregations know well, with the hope and prayer that at least some of those congregated might this time be inspired to live what they profess to believe a little better. They aim at hearts, not minds, seeking to change desires, not ideas. The TED talk – classically; no doubt there are exceptions – proposes new ideas to the hearer; it aims at communicating information, not redirecting desire. Generally in my (I freely admit, limited) experience, the informational content of a TED talk is fully conveyed in the first three minutes; however interesting and arresting the talk, there is no need or purpose in watching beyond that. I confess to a very short attention span – no; let me rephrase that; I confess to a very low boredom threshold. I can give weeks to working slowly through an obscure Latin text if it continues to offer me something new, but a videoed speaker who has said his piece gets about twenty seconds more, and then is dismissed. Revivalist sermons told their hearers nothing new, but convicted them of the need to act on the things they professed to know. They aimed at desires, not ideas. This is, simply, the right use of oratory. And in politics and in business this is visibly the successful use of the set-piece speech. I play my students a speech Bill Gates gave, full of technical specs, rich in information, instantly forgettable, extraordinarily boring. Then I play them Steve Jobs’s keynote from a few weeks later, launching the MacBook Air. He said one thing: ‘it’s thin.’ Oh, there is a pile of numbers and pictures and comparisons to make you realise that he means, ‘no, really, it’s thin!’ And there is of course a powerful message about desire: ‘thin is beautiful; thin is desirable; you want this computer…’ But the informational content of the speech? ‘It’s thin.’ The speech is aimed at hearts, not heads; it is about desires,...
Read MoreOn repentance, forgiveness, and the Church of the Second Chance
My friend Natalie Collins wrote a piece a few weeks ago for the (excellent) preachweb.org site responding to an earlier piece by Martin Saunders; both reflect on how a preacher might deal with the simmering news story concerning the footballer Ched Evans, who has recently been released from prison on licence for a rape conviction, and is looking for a club to resurrect his career. He is (or was) talented enough that a number of clubs are tempted; his crime, his refusal to acknowledge his guilt, and his public lack of remorse, are together sufficiently sickening that the opinion of the public and (perhaps more crucially) that of a significant number of financial sponsors is set against at having him at any particular club. As a result a rolling story is being played out, with one club after another testing the possibility of signing him and then – in every case, so far – refusing to do so, because the financial and reputational cost is too great. Natalie does an excellent job of pointing out the structural and sociological realities that lie behind this story, and I don’t really want to address the particular narrative, other than to note my agreement with what she says. The defence offered for Evans by those who wish to employ him, or to see him employed, is uniform: ‘he’s served his time’ and deserves ‘a second chance’. The first claim is factually untrue (he is released on licence and so in law he is still serving his sentence); it is also uninteresting, at least from a Christian perspective. The interesting question here (as Martin noted) is about repentance, which is a necessary precursor to rehabilitation. What does it mean to ‘repent’ adequately? What does one need to do to be granted a ‘second chance’? The phrase, inevitably, reminded me of Anne Tyler’s excellent novel Saint Maybe. (Actually, that is redundant: it’s a novel by Anne Tyler; obviously it is excellent). The novel tells the story of the Bedloe family, and particularly of Ian Bedloe, who is at high school as it begins, but some way in is nineteen and a freshman in college. At this point he also is (or feels) responsible for the suicides of his brother and sister-in-law. Struggling with guilt, and worrying how his parents will manage to bring up the orphaned children, he finds his way into a small storefront church called ‘The Church of the Second Chance’, pastored by the Revd Emmett. He prays for forgiveness, and falls into conversation with the pastor (quotations from pp. 122-124 of my Vintage paperback edition): ‘…don’t you think? Don’t you think I’m forgiven?’ ‘Goodness, no,’ Reverend Emmett said briskly. Ian’s mouth fell open. He wondered if he’d misunderstood. He said, ‘I’m not forgiven?’ ‘Oh, no.’ ‘But … I thought that was kind of the point,’ Ian said, ‘I thought God forgives everything.’ ‘He does,’ Reverend Emmett said, ‘But you can’t just say, “I’m sorry, God.” Why, anyone could do that much! You have to offer reparation–concrete, practical reparation, according to the rules of our church.’ ‘But what if there isn’t any reparation? What if it’s something nothing will fix?’ ‘Well, that’s where Jesus comes in, of course … Jesus remembers how difficult life on earth can be … He helps with what you can’t undo. But only after you’ve tried to undo it.’ The pastor calmly tells Ian that, for him, the path to forgiveness involves dropping out of college so that he can raise the children. Ian’s response: ‘This is some kind of a test, isn’t it?’ he said finally. Reverend Emmett nodded, smiling. Ian sagged with relief. ‘It’s God’s test,’ Reverend Emmett told him … ‘God wants to know how far you’ll go to undo the harm you’ve done.’ ‘But He wouldn’t really make me follow through with it.’ Ian said. ‘How else would he know, then?’ After working through the reality of this demand, Ian explodes: ‘…What kind of a cockeyed religion is this?’ ‘It’s the religion of atonement and complete forgiveness,’ Reverend Emmett said. ‘It’s the religion of the Second Chance.’ Then he set all the hymnals on the counter and turned to offer Ian a beatific smile. Ian thought he had never seen anyone so absolutely at peace. Ian follows through on the demand, despite the horror of his parents, and the latter two-thirds of the book trace the reality of the second chance he has found through his repentance. I have some theological questions about the language Revd Emmett uses in speaking to Ian – it is a bit too much like a classical American self-help religion, ‘God helps those who help themselves’ – but there is something deep here. Real repentance must, at least, mean a burning...
Read More‘A dirge for the down-grade?’
I recently had a meeting in London at the Oasis Waterloo centre; arriving slightly early, I stayed on the tube for one more stop and went to the Metropolitan Tabernacle bookshop, which I frequent fairly regularly, mostly for its republications of older Puritan and Baptist material that is not easily available elsewhere. I picked up, amongst other things, a slim paperback promising Spurgeon’s original source materials on the ‘Down Grade’ controversy, the event that led to his withdrawal from the Baptist Union, and to several strained relationships. The volume is not complete (most obviously to my eyes, MTP2085, ‘A Dirge for the Down-Grade’, is missing; that said, I had the privilege of discovering and cataloging Spurgeon’s own notes on this sermon back in the day, so I may be ascribing it undue prominence…); it does, however, collect the relevant notes from the Sword and Trowel, which is valuable. I had not read the material abstracted like this before, and several consistent themes jump out from it, when read in sequence. Spurgeon is deeply concerned about a general falling-away from Biblical Christianity infecting the churches in his day; he constructs this, not as a matter of degree, but as a fundamental binary: ‘A new religion has been initiated, which is no more Christianity than chalk is cheese…’ (S&T, Aug. 1887) One is, on his construction, faithful – or one is apostate. There is no middle space. Now, of course, every evangelical will have some sympathy with this; we believe in conversion and the new birth; there is a basic binary divide: once-born vs twice-born; in Adam vs in Christ; … But every thoughtful evangelical will also hesitate, because in our history we have repeatedly and wrongly aligned this basic binary with other opinions which, whilst perhaps important, are not direct correlates. Far too often, we have questioned the salvation of people with whom we disagree about this or that; it is a habit we desperately need to break. Spurgeon repeatedly insists that in speaking of a ‘down-grade’ he is not speaking of Arminianism; this is interesting: a century or more earlier a Calvinistic Baptist like Spurgeon would have absolutely identified Arminianism as a departure from Biblical Christianity – and rightly so; seventeenth-century Arminianism was, basically, a rationalistic system. In the eighteenth century, an ‘evangelical Arminianism’ developed which – right or wrong (my sympathies here remain with Spurgeon…) – was nonetheless recognisably committed to the authority of Scripture and the necessity of the new birth. What is he speaking of? Strikingly, his most common illustration, cited in almost every reference he makes to the ‘Down-grade’, is that pastors not only attend the theatre, but defend the practice of so doing. Next to the theatre, he references the decline of attendance at prayer meetings, and some more theological themes, but this is his most regularly repeated point. Here, my sympathies are not with Spurgeon. It happens that, presently, I do not go to the theatre very often; our local theatre closed a couple of years back. In a different context I would go more often. I do not regard this as a basic failure of morality, or a departure from Biblical Christianity (‘theatre’ not being a common Biblical term, as far as I recall…), I know why seventeeth-century Puritans objected to the theatre of their day – they were right to – I do not think their concerns speak meaningfully to the theatre of our day, or of Spurgeon’s. Now, of course, I may be wrong about this, but I suspect there will be relatively few who are wholly with Spurgeon on this one today, and even fewer who would hold up, as he did, theatre-going as the key demonstration of apostasy from the Biblical faith. I read the texts finally with some sadness; Spurgeon’s basic concerns were not misplaced; there was unquestionably a broad departure from evangelical Christianity amongst the English nonconformists of his day. His mode of waging the campaign, however, seems to me to have been very unfortunate; even he acknowledged that he was drawing a divide not between the faithful and the apostate, but through the middle of the faithful camp, as he separated from those who, whilst remaining committed to Scriptural faith, did not agree with his response to ‘the down-grade’. Further, as the example of the focus on the theatre shows, his illustrations of what constituted apostasy were sometimes rather eccentric, and often enough very poorly aimed. He knew that the central points were the authority of Scripture and the necessity of the new birth; why not stand there, rather than seeking proxies? Of course, in every age, including our own, the church has been very energetic in seeking out...
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