‘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 MoreA mother in Israel
I was out preaching at another church this morning; I’d planned the sermon some weeks ago, before I realised it would be Mothering Sunday. This week I’ve struggled again with a commercialised festival that constructs a romanticised picture to celebrate, ignoring the pain this heaps on so many who for whatever reason cannot fit that picture. Pete Greig tweeted a wonderful litany this morning which captured this remarkably well; my response was to tell a story in the ‘children’s talk’ slot that explored a rather different vision of ‘Biblical motherhood’ than is usually offered. The style is visibly, to me, a second-rate Bob Hartman rip-off, but here it is: ‘A mother in Israel’ There are lots of mothers in the Bible. You may have heard of some of them. There’s Eve, right at the beginning, who is called ‘the mother of all living’ There’s Sarah, who laughed when God told her she would become a mother at eighty. There’s Hannah, who prayed for a child and rebuked God’s priest. There’s Mary, of course, who believed God’s word and became the centre of God’s plan. Lots of mothers in the Bible – but there’s one mother who, as far as we know, didn’t have any children. Her name was Deborah – which, for those of us of a certain age, brings to mind a Marc Bolan song, but we’re not going there… Deborah was a prophet, and she led God’s people for years. She ‘held court,’ the Bible says, under a palm tree. Whenever God’s people had a problem they could not solve, they would come to Deborah, and she would tell them what to do. She was wise. She had authority. She was a real leader. But – as far as we know – she didn’t have any children, and so she wasn’t a mother yet. God’s people had one big problem in Deborah’s day. His name was Sisera. Sisera was the commander of the army of King Jabin of Canaan, and Sisera had nine hundred armoured chariots, and so no-one could fight against Sisera. And for twenty years – twenty years – that’s only one year less than the age of lots of your mothers – for twenty years Sisera and his chariots had oppressed and abused God’s people. But God had had enough. God needed someone to be a great leader; God needed someone ready to fight; God needed someone brave enough and strong enough to take on Sisera and all his armoured chariots You might have looked for a king. Or a knight. Or a general. Or perhaps a superhero like Batman or Captain America (or even Emmet the lego-man – but we’re not going there…) God looked for a mother. ‘Deborah!’ God said. ‘What do mothers do?’ And Deborah, being wise, and knowing God well, said ‘mothers love and protect their children, Lord, and show them the right way to live.’ And God said ‘You’ve loved my people for years, Deborah, and you’ve showed them the right way to live for years. Now I need you to protect them too.’ So Deborah looked around. Deborah knew all God’s people – she’d been their leader for years – and she called one of them who she knew could do it to put an army together. (His name was Barak, which might sound like a politician you’ve heard of, but we’re not going there either …) ‘God wants to save his people from Sisera, Barak, and you’re the one he’s going to use – get an army together and fight!’ But Barak was scared. He wanted his mummy. ‘I’ll only go if you come with me,’ he said to Deborah. So Barak and Deborah went, and they fought Sisera and his army, and all his chariots. And they won, because God was with them. And Deborah and Barak sang a song to celebrate their victory – a duet like they sing in the Battle rounds on The Voice – but we’re definitely not going there… Their song was a bit like the psalms; it was a song about how God had helped and saved their people. And in that song – it’s in Judges, chapter 5 and verse 7 if you want to look it up, Deborah sang that all God’s people were too scared to fight ‘until I, Deborah, arose, until I arose, a mother in Israel’. So Deborah, although as far as we know she didn’t have any children, was a mother after all, or so the Bible tells us. She was a mother because God called her to love and to protect God’s people, and to show them the...
Read MoreThought Leaders: Coleridge, the Clerisy, and Catalyst Live
It was a privilege to be a part of the ‘Catalyst Live’ event organised and sponsored by BMS World Mission a few weeks back. The vision, the mix of speakers, and the organisation, were each simply excellent; I got asked to give a couple of talks, but also to engage personally with Jürgen Moltmann. Hearing him tell his own story, of discovering the hope that is in Christ as he read the Bible whilst a prisoner of war in a camp in Kilmarnock, was profoundly moving; talking to him at some length as we planned the interview sessions – well; I have disagreed with aspects of his theology in public, and I stand by those points; but his personal graciousness, gentleness, and humility were utterly captivating and disarming. (At one point, as we shared a sandwich, I asked him who the up-and-coming theologians in Germany were; he responded, then looked at me with a smile and asked who ‘the other rising theologians in the UK’ might be…) I am enormously grateful to David Kerrigan, Mark Craig, and the rest of the BMS team who put it together and who asked me to be involved. I have, I think, three reflections on being part of the event that might be aired publicly. The first concerns the vision of the event. It was cast as for ‘thought leaders,’ and I heard a number of people – all local pastors – express doubt as to whether the event was for them, because they were not ‘thought leaders’. On the one hand, I talked enough to those who organised the event to know that, yes, if you are a local pastor, it was for you; on the other, I understand the hesitation and concern. This collision, I think, bears reflection. In his brilliant, if deeply eccentric, text On the Constitution of the Church and the State, Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed that the ‘church’ is necessary to the proper functioning of the State, where ‘church’ is understood as ‘the body of educated people who understand and transmit the values/ethos of the nation.’ If the national church happens to be Christian, it is an inestimable boon, he believed, but he made the term ‘church’ broader than merely Christian groups. He envisaged the ‘national church’ necessarily putting in place two individuals in every locality – think ‘parish’ or – perhaps better – ‘village’: the priest and the schoolmaster. The priest’s role is to remind and instruct the adult population of/in the broad beliefs of the culture; the schoolmaster’s role is to induct the children of the community into these broad beliefs. Now, there are lots of questions to ask about this account: what, given that this is a post about an explicitly Baptist initiative, of nonconformity, of those communities that gather seriously but refuse state recognition? Where is the place for principled debate, for those whose calling is to challenge and develop the ethos of the nation? (To be fair to Coleridge, he had a place for this in his account of the national government, which is a synthesis of forces of ‘permanence’ and ‘progress’ – but it seems that at local level there only is space in his system for people who conform to national visions.) That said, he captured something important: every parish, every village, needs its clerisy, its thought leaders. Coleridge was trying to set in stone a particular moment in English history; at this distance, and given his involvement in defining Romantic aesthetics, it is tempting to see this text, although presented as a (real and serious) protest against the Catholic Emancipation Bill, as an act of resistance against the urbanisation of the industrial revolution; of course, his attempts to command the tides of history were no more successful than Canute’s attempts to command less metaphorical tides, and the perfect English village he imagined has become a community-lite shell of weekend cottages or, if it is lucky, of commuter dormitories. That said, locality still matters. Not exclusively – network society is a reality – but then locality was never exhaustive; the county set were not defined by their villages of residence in Coleridge’s ideal England, even. But locality still matters; in the community I live in, we have debates about re-siting the local secondary school, and about housing provision, and about HMO licences, about the changing use of a military base, and about a dozen other things, that in every case relate to national debates, but in evert case also have particular local contexts and shapes. If the role of Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ – thought leaders – is to speak well into these debates, to show how they are shaped...
Read MoreOnce again: on being unapologetically charismatic
‘Are you a closet charismatic, Steve?’ I was having lunch with someone I like and respect greatly when he threw this one at me a month or two back. My response was heartfelt and immediate: ‘What do you mean, “closet”?’ On this issue, I’m out and proud – although hardly uncritical of the movement as a whole, or in its various strands. Because of this, I initially looked seriously at the first reports from the ‘Strange Fire’ conference that happened across the pond a while back; I have to admit that I quickly lost interest: there are some serious theological criticisms to be made of the charismatic movement, but there was no-one on that platform capable of making them. I picked up a farrago of unsubstantiated assertion, inaccurate history, poor exegesis, and – well, generally, it wasn’t good, and I quickly tuned out. One point stuck with me from what little I read, though. My friend Andrew Wilson, who clearly has far more patience and Christian charity than I do, engaged seriously with some of the arguments presented at the conference on the Think Theology blog here; I want to pick up just on one theme, albeit a rather central one: the definition of ‘charismatic’. Andrew quotes, and accepts, a definition offered at the SF conference by Tom Pennington: to be ‘charismatic’ is to support the continuation of the ‘miraculous gifts’. I am not convinced by this definition. My concern with this is simple, and deeply partial, in the sense that it is based only on my own experience and knowledge only, and not on any serious research. The charismatic movement which I know might formally be characterised theologically by its belief about certain spiritual gifts, but this is some distance from its lived concerns and interests. Andrew makes the point that the ‘charismatic/cessationist’ debate is not about belief in continuing miracles: conversion – God giving new life to someone dead in their trespasses and sins – remains the fundamental miracle of the church’s experience, and is believed and rejoiced in on all sides of this debate. I want to push this further, though: consider the ‘gift of healing’: on the ‘cessationist’ side, I have never met a pastor who does not pray seriously for God’s healing for his/her flock when they are ill; on the ‘charismatic’ side, I do not think I have met anyone who claims to have ‘the gift of healing’ (I know they exist; my point is that much – perhaps most – charismatic life is not narrated in these terms). I know many people – including one of my own children – who can give serious testimony to seeing instantaneous and apparently-miraculous healing happening in response to prayer; but the language of a ‘gift of healing’ is not the way these testimonies would be framed. Similarly, I think of people in congregations I have led (or been a part of) who would regularly prophesy in our worship times; none ever (in my hearing) claimed a ‘gift of prophecy’; that was not their self-understanding of how they were ministering. Again, I stress, I am reflecting on my own experience – but I have been on the speaking or leadership teams of several major charismatic conferences in the UK over the last decade; in some of these prophecy, healing, and salvation were daily realities; I never recall hearing the language of ‘gift of healing/prophecy’ in any context in any of them. When I have been present when messages in tongues have come, the request from the front has always been something like ‘Did anyone sense God speaking as that message was brought?’ not ‘Does anyone have the gift of interpretation?’ Again, I know lots of people who pray in tongues. It happens that I pray in tongues every day (that rumbling sound you can hear is the collapsing of my academic credibility). I suppose if someone asked me ‘have you received the gift of tongues’ I would say yes, but I do not recall ever being asked that question, and I do not habitually think of my spirituality in those terms; my ordinary daily discipline is to say an office, to pray in tongues, and to intercede for needs I am aware of; during the day, I will respond to events/thoughts in prayer regularly, sometimes praying in tongues, sometimes not (our family prayer time at night is obviously in English exclusively). The daily office – and the family devotional material we use – would be as much a ‘gift’ in my narration of this as the ability to pray in tongues; to speak of ‘the supernatural gift of tongues’ is just...
Read MoreImprovising in the key of gospel
My friend Wesley Hill (who blogs, with others, wonderfully here, incidentally) shared a story about Pope John Paul II on Twitter today – do read the link, but the essence is that the Holy Father encountered a priest who had deserted his vocation and had been reduced to begging, and then restored him by asking the fallen priest to hear his – the Pope’s – confession. (There seems to be some evidence that the story is factual, not hagiographic, incidentally.) The story grabbed me: I added it to a small group of tales I know, only some of which I can tell (the most personal I can’t, online, because of the people involved. But ask me why I just love baby showers one day when we’re alone). Tony Campolo’s famous tale that ends ‘I belong to the sort of church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at three o’clock in the morning’ is on the list too. Another of these stories involves two other friends, Brenda and Andrew Marin (whilst I’m doing the linklove, Brenda blogs here and Andrew blogs here), and concerns a bunch of Christians in and around Boystown, Chicago, who became seriously upset that the only Christian voice at the annual Pride march was people shouting ‘SIN’ loudly through megaphones from behind barricades. So they printed up some T-shirts and handwrote some signage saying ‘I’m sorry – if you’ve been judged or dehumanised by a church … for Bible-banging homophobes … for how the church has treated you …’ Buzzfeed had their mere existence as #1 of ’21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity’; but the real story came when a guy named Tristan, who was a semi-naked dancer on one of the Pride floats, saw it and got it, and ran and threw his arms around one of them, Nathan, who blogged about it, memorably beginning, ‘I hugged a man in his underwear. I think Jesus would have too.’ What are these stories for me? I have a talk I give from time to time, which begins riffing (with Callum Brown) about ‘the death of Christian Britain’ and moves on to responses. I make the move to exile (the title of the talk is often ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore…’), and look at the responses of God’s people to being exiled. There is a surrender to despair in Ps. 137; if you reach as far as Maccabees, but only then, there is a vision of culture war (not in our Bibles anywhere, churches of the Reformation; we might think on that and learn from it…); there is, in the birth of Pharisaism, a rigid adherence to the old rules; and then there is vegetarianism and hospitality. The vegetarianism, of course, comes in Daniel 1; the hospitality in Esther 5-7. Two great OT saints, Esther and Daniel, respond to a changed cultural context by creatively re-imagining what faithfulness to God might look like. They both improvise (as does Nehemiah – see ch. 2 – and, well, everyone else who gets it right); they re-envisage the old laws in a new context, and invent creative ways forward that are utterly faithful to God’s covenant and at the same time completely responsive to the culture. In the new context of exile, careful adherence to the old laws won’t work (and now you need to make a daily sacrifice in Jerusal… Oh.); we can surrender to despair (Ps. 137); we can fight some rearguard action (Maccabees); we can choose a set of rules that still apply and be slavish in following them (Pharisaism) – or we can improvise. In music – these days, particularly in jazz, but the cadenza of a concerto used to work the same way – improvisation is a fascinating art. Good improvisation is profoundly responsive to what has come before, and in certain ways obedient to the key and to the rhythmic structure of the piece, but at the same time it is deeply inventive. Improvisation is also instinctive: jazz musicians say regularly that your fingers go the right places; the moment you have to think about it, you’ve blown it completely. To improvise instinctively, of course, you have to practice endlessly, playing and playing and playing, till your fingers know where to go without being told. Put another way, you start to indwell the music, knowing instinctively, without thought, what can or must come next, even when there are no notes printed on a score. For me, living faithfully after Christendom is an exercise in improvising in the key of gospel. We face – daily; hourly – previously-unimagined challenges and situations; a set of rules is too solid, too...
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