Making Sense of Sex

Adrian Thatcher

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780281064069
• eBook ISBN: 9780281068838
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

All living creatures are sexed. Human beings belong to societies where traditions about who can have sex with whom, and how, and when, are centuries old. Making sense of sex assumes that there is a rational way of understanding our basic drives. But our inevitable failure to get sex right is the beginning of a proper and theological understanding of sex. The Christian tradition, especially in its conservative forms, is often thought to be unhelpful in making sense of sex. Christian sexual ethics may seem overly demanding: holistic in theory, yet sexist and pessimistic in practice. Adrian Thatcher argues, however, that instead of being pessimistic about sex, Christians can be grateful realists instead. Making Sense of Sex draws on the resources of Liberal Theology to promote a mature union of spirituality and sexuality. Exploring topics such as desire, bodies and the Body of Christ, sexual difference, homosexuality, marriage, and Paul's reflection on 'flesh' and 'spirit', it will help to guide readers towards a spiritual understanding of shared sexual love.

1

Making sense of the sources

In this first chapter the question how Christians might make sense of sex is discussed. First, several barriers to understanding are named and removed. Second, the sources that are available for Christians to use for making sense of sex are described. Third, the approach of Liberal Theology to making sense of sex is outlined.

Making sense of sex?

Making sense of sex is a very tall order indeed. This volume belongs to a series of ‘Making Sense of’ books. God’s love, the Bible, and so on, are subjects we can try and make some sense of. But when it comes to sex, we are the subjects. We are sexed: we have a sex. Many of us have sex. The puzzle is of a different order because we ourselves are part of the puzzle.

All living creatures are sexed. They need to be roughly male or female in order to reproduce. But human beings are reflective, self-conscious creatures. When we want to have sex, we know we do. Human beings belong to societies where traditions about who can have sex with whom, and how, and when, are centuries old. Powerful instincts are hedged about with regulation and constraint. But these constraints, and our acceptance of them, are not, like God, everlasting. Conventions change, yet still our innermost desires often conflict with them.

Making sense of sex assumes that there is some possible way of understanding it, and so of arriving at a rational grasp of some of our basic instincts and drives. Even this assumption is problematic. Not only can the power of desire overwhelm our moral convictions, the argument over which is the stronger – reason or passion – is an old and inconclusive one. Sex seems to elude codification and control.

Having sex cannot be separated out from wider issues of gender, and so of power and dominance, powerlessness and surrender, vulnerability as well as ecstasy, and often fear, comedy and tragedy. Rowan Williams summed up the multiple ambiguities of sex by asking:

Why does sex matter? Most people know that sexual intimacy is in some ways frightening for them, that it is quite simply the place where they began to be taught whatever maturity they have. Most of us know that the whole business is irredeemably comic, surrounded by so many odd chances and so many opportunities for making a fool of yourself. Plenty know that it is the place where they are liable to be most profoundly damaged or helpless. Culture in general and religion in particular have devoted enormous energy to the doomed task of getting it right.¹

Is getting sex right doomed from the start? Williams is clear that we are never going to get sex right. But the inevitable failure to get it right does not amount to a sexual pessimism about sexual encounters or relationships. It is the beginning of a proper and theological understanding of sex. He continues: ‘I want to try and understand a little better why the task is doomed, and why the fact that it’s doomed is a key to seeing more fully why and how it matters – and even seeing more fully what this mattering has to do with God.’

Not getting sex right, on this view, is the key to making sense of it. Through our failings and fumblings we may become wiser.

Barriers to understanding

Very many people, including not a few Christians, do not find the Christian tradition very helpful for making sense of sex. It is not that people wilfully forsake a demanding sexual ethic for a more easy-going worldly one. It is that they often cannot see the point of its ‘demandingness’. The Roman Catholic Church has the strictest teachings of all denominations. Plenty of Christians, including Catholics, cannot see the point of remaining within a marriage that is spiritually dead, or forbidding the use of condoms to millions of people in the grip of the HIV & AIDS pandemic. Plenty of lesbian and gay Christians cannot see the point of the teachings raised against them. Plenty of Christians cannot see the point of refraining from sex until marriage (usually in their late twenties, or early thirties) or from masturbating if they feel like it.

Christians try to obey God. The problem, of course, is that the will of God must first be known before it can be obeyed. The Christian faith is changing, and the Christian understanding of the character of God is changing too. Many Christians just can’t make sense of a God who requires constant heroic resistance to the very desires that God has placed in us. It is not that the counter-cultural demand of Christian witness is being refused. Radical obedience requires radical reasons for it to be sustained. Traditional teachings about sex and gender are one of the reasons why people left the Church in the 1960s.²

Dualism

There are at least three other reasons why the Christian tradition, especially in its conservative forms, may be thought to be unhelpful in making sense of sex. These can be labelled dualism, sexism and pessimism. Dualism is any view that assumes that one thing is really two things (duo in Latin). A standard Christian view, held by a clear majority of theologians, is set out in the Roman Catholic Catechism:

The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.³

This view (standard since St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century) is obviously not dualistic, for it combines soul and body, and spirit and matter within a ‘unity’. It has the name holism (from the Greek, holos, ‘whole’). The problem is that much Christian thought is holistic in theory, yet thoroughly dualistic in practice. It can maintain the unity of the person while allowing a disastrous devaluation of the body in relation to the soul.⁴

Nearly 20 years ago I analysed dualism by means of six pairs of opposites. They were:

Soul Body

Reason Passion

Will Desire

Spirit Flesh

Culture Nature

Public Private⁵

It is easy to see the havoc that these pairs of opposites can cause for human self-understanding. The first four terms on the left have come to represent the spiritual side of the person, that which is eternal, incorporeal and most like God. The first four terms on the right have come to represent the temporal, corporeal side of the human person – mortal, frail and fallen. The terms on the left are privileged in relation to their counterparts on the right. All six pairs are often depicted as in conflict with each other, so that the person becomes the site of conflict between opposing forces; between a ‘microcosm’ (a tiny world) within and a ‘macrocosm’ (the world further out).

Sexism

It has become clear that soul/body dualism fosters another kind of dualism, male/female dualism, or (to use a contemporary term) sexism. In the last 20 years gender, ‘the relations between women and men’,⁶ has been intensively studied and the Christian tradition has been shown to be lacking in its contribution to taking seriously the full personhood of women. Many contemporary Christians, I suspect, have little idea of how women have been regarded in Christian tradition. The attitude of Jesus towards women was very different from that of theologians in the intervening centuries between the Bible and our own times. Until recently men were thought to be closely associated with soul, reason, will and spirit; women with body, passion, desire and flesh. That explains why men were identified with culture, women with nature; men with the public, women with the private world (the fifth and sixth pairs of opposites). It also explains why men got an education, occupied the professions and ran the world.

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Many contemporary Christians have little idea of how women have been regarded in Christian tradition

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‘Incarnation’ or ‘excarnation’?

Christianity is distinctive by its belief that God has come and lived among us. John’s Gospel says, ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (John 1.14). The name given to Christ’s coming among us as flesh is incarnation. An incarnational faith might be thought to be lived out in the encounters of fleshly bodies. However, another concept, excarnation, has recently appeared, and it well captures what has happened to Christianity in the last 500 years. The flesh has been ejected in favour of a faith that is much more, if not completely, cerebral in its reception and expression. Charles Taylor (in a very long and dense book) shows how ‘official Christianity has gone through what we can call an “excarnation”, a transfer out of embodied, “enfleshed” forms of religious life, to those which are more “in the head”’.⁷ In a prophetic passage, he says:

We tend to live in our heads, trusting our disengaged understandings: of experience, of beauty … even the ethical: we think that the only valid form of ethical self-direction is through rational maxims or understanding. We can’t accept that part of being good is opening ourselves to certain feelings; either the horror at infanticide, or agape as a gut feeling.⁸

There are, of course, reactions to this longer-term historical process. Late modern promiscuity is a good example of a return to incarnation (but hardly a ‘re-incarnation’!) where living in and through the heightened experience of the body has become the supreme good. A believable Christian faith must own up to its part in bringing about this excarnation, and offer its adherents an alternative to the fleshly indulgences of a decadent capitalist culture. The alternative must make sense both of the God-given pleasures of intimacy and the enormous responsibilities that accompany the sharing of it. This book tries to do this.

Donna Freitas’ recent study of sexual experience on college campuses in the USA, Sex and the Soul,⁹ indicates the necessity of a balanced theology of sex which avoids the extremes of the ‘hook-up culture’ on the one hand, and the ‘no-sex-thank-you-we-are-evangelicals’ on the other. Only in evangelical colleges is there serious opposition to the hook-up culture and Freitas rightly commends them for this. However, there is a high price to be paid among the students – in her terms, the drastic sundering of sexual experience from their souls. Dualism rules once more. The evangelical ethos (among its many other characteristics)

exacts demands on students that can be severe, debilitating and often unrealistic. The pressures to marry are extreme for women, and college success is often determined by a ring, not a diploma. Because of the strong hold of purity culture, many students learn to practise sexual secrecy, professing chastity in public while keeping their honest feelings and often their actual experiences hidden.¹⁰

These attitudes are not confined to American campuses; they are common in the Church. Again, this book offers a middle way, drawing on the resources of Liberal Theology in order to promote a mature union of spirituality and sexuality together.

Pessimism

Some Christians are deeply pessimistic about the social trends towards greater sexual freedom. We have just discussed the distressing prevalence of promiscuity. It is possible to see pre-marital sex, rising divorce rates, abortion, promiscuity, the tolerance of homosexuality, the legalization of civil partnerships, and so on, as evidence of late modern decadence. Sexual sins are thought to be evidence of the weakening of religious faith, of growing secularization, and of a falling away from a proud and devout Christian past. In fact the situation is immensely more complicated. There is another way of reading social changes, where the acknowledgement of human rights and the increase in social justice have made steady gains over racism, sexism, patriarchalism and colonialism (all of which derived much succour from Christianity). It is no longer a requirement to remain locked in a destructive marriage. Marital rape is now a crime. There is no longer a need fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author information
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• 1. Making sense of the sources
• 2. Making sense of desire – from repression to expression
• 3. Making sense of bodies – from ‘sinful bodies’ to the Body of Christ
• 4. Making sense of sexual difference – from difference to indifference
• 5. Making sense of homosexuality – from disgust to delight
• 6. Making sense of marriage – from patriarchy to partnership
• 7. Making sense of Spirit – from crucifixion to inspiration
• Notes
• Further reading