The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion

New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals

Blake Hereth, Kevin Timpe, Blake Hereth, Kevin Timpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429663550
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Contemporary research in philosophy of religion is dominated by traditional problems such as the nature of evil, arguments against theism, issues of foreknowledge and freedom, the divine attributes, and religious pluralism. This volume instead focuses on unrepresented and underrepresented issues in the discipline. The essays address how issues like race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, feminist and pantheist conceptions of the divine, and nonhuman animals connect to existing issues in philosophy of religion. By staking out new avenues for future research, this book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in analytic philosophy of religion and analytic philosophical theology.

Section V
Sex, Gender, and Race

12 Marriage, Reproduction, and the Incarnation

What Could Jesus Do?

Eric T. Yang and Stephen T. Davis

Introduction

It has been customary among Christians to hold that Jesus Christ did not take a spouse, did not have children, and did not engage in sexual activity.¹ The canonical Gospels certainly report no such things. But some recent historians and archeologists have challenged this view. For instance, in 2012 Harvard historian Karen King brought to public attention a fragment from a fourth-century Coptic gospel that included the inscription, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife,’ ” which led some to believe that Jesus had been married. Another example comes from Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson’s (2015) book The Lost Gospel, which purports to expose evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had children. These ideas also appear in popular culture, such as Dan Brown’s book (and the resulting film) The Da Vinci Code. However, most historical scholars have impugned the authenticity of these findings.² Even King has recently concluded that the discovered fragment is likely a forgery.

We will not be addressing this historical debate but will assume the standard view regarding Jesus’s marital and parental status. We are, however, aware of some Christians who find the idea of Jesus engaging in sexual activity, being married, or having children as impious or somehow demeaning of Christ’s divinity, and we want to take this concern seriously. There are two related questions that should be distinguished:

1. Would it have been morally impermissible for an incarnate God to take a spouse, to engage in sexual relations, or to biologically reproduce?³
2. Would it have been (overall) unfitting⁴ for an incarnate God to do so?

In this paper, we’ll attempt to answer both of these questions. Regarding (1), we consider some possible reasons for answering that question in the affirmative, but we conclude that these reasons are weak. However, this issue does raise the question of why we should think that such activities are morally permissible for an incarnate God, and, as we will argue, how one answers that question depends on which theory one holds with respect to God’s ethical standards.

But even if it is morally permissible for an incarnate God to engage in sexual relations or have a wife and children, one may still wonder about (2). After a brief discussion on the notion of fittingness, we’ll look into considerations for why it may seem fitting for an incarnate God to engage in such activities. In the end, however, we argue that it would not have been overall fitting for Jesus to do so, especially given the actual circumstances of the time and the location of the incarnation and its subsequent effects. Given that it is overall unfitting, we should expect not to find an incarnate God who did engage in such activities, which accords with the dominant view of historical scholarship on Jesus’s marital and parental status.

The Question of Moral Permissibility

As far as we know, no academic scholar has offered an argument for the moral impermissibility of Christ engaging in sexual activity or having a wife or children. Nevertheless, we have noticed an almost knee-jerk reaction against the very idea of it. When King’s fragment and Jacobovici and Barrie’s book came out, there was a storm of popular-level responses on blogs and social media seeking to refute the alleged claims. On some occasions, there seemed to be an implicit assumption or concern that it is somehow unbecoming or unacceptable for Jesus to have engaged in such things.

One motivation for this popular reaction may be due to a quasi-Gnostic impulse by some Christians, where the body or bodily desires are regarded as inherently bad whereas the spiritual or spiritual desires are regarded as inherently good. This may yield tendencies towards Docetism in Christology, where Jesus was truly divine but only appeared to be human. Additionally, some Christians also understand St. Paul’s use of ‘sarx’ or ‘flesh’ to mean sin-nature (which is evident in some of the earlier NIV translations of the Bible), which is often associated with the physical body and its desires—and this is so even though most biblical scholars do not interpret ‘sarx’ in this way (Russell 1993). This negative attitude towards the body or the physical should not hold much weight, however, since traditional Christianity maintains that God created a good world, and that human beings are created in the image of God (which we take to include both mental and physical aspects). Moreover, Jesus is clearly depicted in the Gospels as eating and drinking, even to the point where some of his contemporaries worried that he was a drunkard (or at least associated too closely with those who were). So the quasi-Gnostic impulse should be rejected by Christians.⁵

Another reason for the negative reaction to Jesus having a wife or engaging in sexual activity may come from strictly Roman Catholic quarters, in particular in the defense of celibate priests. Catholic theologian Max Thurian (1993) claims that since Christ never married, “His life is valid justification for the vocation to celibacy.” The mandate of priestly celibacy is no doubt controversial, but the claim is that holding to a celibate Christ appears to provide some support for priestly celibacy given that Christ serves as an example or model for priests. This will of course be unpersuasive for those who reject the requirement of celibacy for clergy. Moreover, there may be other reasons for endorsing priestly celibacy (which Thurian and other Catholic theologians have offered) which does not rely upon Christ’s celibacy.

Lastly, we have heard of reactions to the claim that Christ engaged in sexual activity as somehow treating the incarnate God’s behavior in a way similar to the ancient Greco-Roman gods, who are recorded as having performed sexual activities and sired demi-god children through the usual biological means (as well as having divine children through non-biological means—such as Athena springing forth from Zeus’s head). Clearly much of the sexual activities of Zeus and the other gods were morally unacceptable, so perhaps it would also be unacceptable for Christ. But the problematic elements between the relations of the Greek gods and humans need not have been present had Christ engaged in such activities. The morally reprehensible aspects include sexual assault and violation of human dignity against the human victims of the gods. But it does not follow that loving sexual activity is thereby precluded.

The source of the worry, as we diagnose it, appears to be the feeling of unease when it comes to discussing sexuality and divinity. But if sexuality is part of God’s creation, which is good, then such a feeling of unease is not warranted, especially with a lack of a compelling reason. Moreover, one might have to be more nuanced in the claim that Christ engages in sexual activity. For the incarnate God could only do so in his human nature—just as he eats and drinks by way of his human nature and not his divine nature. Now his human nature (understanding ‘nature’ in a concrete way)⁶ has biological reproductive features, and his employment of those features should not be any more problematic than his employment of his cardiovascular or gastrointestinal features.

Perhaps, then, the main response to the popular-level worry is to “get over it”—to get over what we are not accustomed to conjoining in our thoughts. However, there is a more pressing issue, which is understanding exactly why it would be morally permissible for an incarnate God to engage in sexual activity, which we turn to next.

What if God’s Ethical Standards Are the Same as Ours?

In order for us to assess whether it is morally permissible for God to engage in sexual activity, we have to answer what makes any act morally permissible or impermissible for God. That is, we have to ask what the ethical standards are for God. God’s ethical standards are either the same as ours or they are different. Let us take each possibility in turn.

Suppose God’s ethical standards are the same as ours, or at least that they overlap considerably with ours. For many Christians, some of the basic moral rules are found in the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus, and it would be morally impermissible to violate any of those moral injunctions. Or one might opt for a particular moral theory—such as divine command theory, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, virtue exemplarism, etc.—such that moral obligations are grounded in God’s commands, or the good will, or more pleasurable or less painful outcomes, or moral exemplars, etc. If God’s ethical standards are the same as ours, then God would perform a wrong action provided that he violated the norm that arises from whichever theory is true of our moral obligations.

With the particular case of sexual activity, marriage, and reproduction, whatever the ethical standards are for humans with respect to these activities would then apply to God. In order to assess this, we need to know what is morally permitted with respect to these activities. Some philosophers have argued that sexual activity must only occur among monogamous married partners or that complete satisfaction of sexual fulfillment must be coital.⁷ Under this view, had Christ engaged in sexual activity without being married or reached complete sexual satisfaction outside of coitus, then Christ would have acted wrongly (which would be incompatible with the claim that he was morally perfect). However, other philosophers claim that sexual activity need not only occur between married couples or that complete satisfaction need not occur only through coitus.⁸

The difficulty, then, of knowing what is morally permissible for an incarnate God to perform depends on figuring out what is morally permissible for anyone with regards to some action. Nevertheless, since we are assuming that Christ is God incarnate, whatever the conditions are for some action being morally permissible, we can state that Christ did not do anything that was morally impermissible.⁹

That said, by most ethical standards, engaging in sexual intercourse, getting married, and having children are not intrinsically morally wrong. And they are not intrinsically immoral according to Christian doctrine. Humans can be involved in these activities provided that they abide by the relevant moral requirements (whatever they may be). If so, then Christ could have licitly engaged in sexual intercourse, married, and had children as long as he did not violate any moral obligations or perform a morally prohibited act.

There is a possible objection: does it follow that because it is not morally wrong for a human being to have sexual relations, take a spouse, and have children, then it is not morally wrong for an incarnate God to do so? This is a complex issue, especially since we are dealing with the concept of a morally perfect being. For some have argued that God must always do what is best or what is in the class of best actions (Rowe 2004). Thus, even if God incarnate violates no binding moral rule in engaging in sexual activity or taking a spouse, it does not follow that this would be one of the morally best things to do.

In response to such a concern, one might argue that a morally perfect being need not always do what is best or that there is neither a best action nor class of best actions (Plantinga 1974). Or one might argue that it is part of the class of best actions for an incarnate God to take a spouse, have sexual relations, or have children (though we have a hard time seeing how the case for this might go). However this is answered, the burden appears to be on the objector who claims that it is not the best for God to marry or have children. After all, what appears to us as the best state of affairs may not in fact be so. For example, we might suppose that the actual world is the best or is among the best worlds, yet it appears to contain horrifying evils, ones that we might not have initially included in our description of the best worlds. Yet if such a world is in the class of best worlds—perhaps because it contains the incarnation and the atonement (Plantinga 2004)—then we should not be troubled by considerations that make it appear as though it is not (at least without further reflection). God may have outweighing reasons for creating a world with horrifying evils, though we may not know what those reasons are.¹⁰ Similarly, God may have outweighing reasons for taking on a spouse that are unknown to us. So this worry seems to us to be misplaced (or at least inadequately developed).

What if God’s Ethical Standards Are Different Than Ours?

There is an easier way out of the above worry, which is to claim that the ethical standards for God are not the same as ours—that the set of moral injunctions that apply to God is disjoint from the set of moral commands that apply to human creatures. In that case, what is morally impermissible for us may not be morally impermissible for God.

Recently, Mark Murphy (2014, 2017) has offered such a view. When moral goodness is ascribed as a property of God, it is often assumed that such a notion includes an orientation towards the welfare of other sentient beings. From this assumption, some conclude that a morally good being (as far as able) prevents anything that would significantly undermine creaturely well-being unless there were strong reasons for not doing so. However, Murphy has rejected this conception of God, instead arguing that a perfect being is not required to promote creaturely well-being.¹¹ One reason is that given the maximal intrinsic value of a perfect being, every possible world with a perfect being would have no difference in value. So, the promotion of creaturely well-being does not increase the value in a world, and thus a perfect being cannot be required to perform any act that promotes creaturely well-being or prevents any setback to creaturely well-being.

What follows is that the ethical standards for God are entirely different from ours (which is compatible with the view that God has no mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section I Methodology
• Section II Religious Epistemology and Experience
• Section III Non-Human Animals
• Section IV Disability
• Section V Sex, Gender, and Race
• Contributors
• Index