Human Sexuality and the Nuptial Mystery

Roy R. Jeal, Jeal

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781606089446
  9781498212182
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890881
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

This collection of essays was originally presented at the St. Margaret's Consultation on Doctrine, Liturgy, and Preaching held at St. Margaret's Anglican Church in Winnipeg, Canada in 2008. They consider human sexuality and marriage from a distinctly theological rather than polemical standpoint, aiming to avoid frequently polarized debates. The interesting commonality indicated in the articles is that sex and marriage are not about self-fulfillment, but are outwardly directed, aimed toward the other person, toward growth, maturity, and deepened spirituality, for the benefit of the church, for productive good, and for children. The first section explores theological and ethical issues surrounding human sexuality and aims toward understanding the nature of relationships in these contexts. The second section explores the spiritual nature of marriage and the history of thinking on marriage and family within Christian theology. For those interested in pursuing truly theological engagement with marriage and sexuality, this collection is required reading.

Desire, Vocation, and Friendship

The Mysteries of Human Sexuality

1

How Can We Frame the Right Questions?

Oliver O’Donovan

Martin Luther opens his Sermon on The Estate of Marriage with the
observation that each of us has a sex. We find ourselves with our sex and can do nothing to change it, and we all have relations with the same and the other sex, from which we cannot by any means extricate ourselves. “Therefore, each one of us must have the kind of body God has created for us. I cannot make myself a woman, nor can you make yourself a man; we do not have that power. But we are exactly as he created us: I a man and you a woman. Moreover, he wills to have his excellent handiwork honored as his divine creation, and not despised.”1 Naïve this may seem, but for a place to begin there are few better. It draws our attention to the question that comes first, before marriage and the blessing of procreation pronounced on man and woman, before “sexuality” and the range of emotional responses and habitual reflexes that may be governed by our sex. Before we can talk of the meeting of the sexes, before we can talk of the experience of being sexed, we must recognise the being of the sexes.

This starting point has the additional benefit of forcing us out of the observer’s and into the existential point of view. To discuss sex well, we must discuss it not as sociologists, amateur or professional, not as behavioural psychologists, conservative or radical, but with a sense that our own being is engaged. Pornography panders to the temptation to treat sexual experience as a transitory entertainment we may look in on from time to time and then go on with our lives unaffected. And it can gain support from ways of discussing sex that fail of existential seriousness. These include not only the detachment of the would-be human-scientist, but the managerial control of the pastoral professional, who, in eagerness to relieve the burden of guilt with minimum fuss, may all too quickly encourage the idea that anything that has to do with sex is superficial and unimportant. From the point of view of the last judgment, of course, it may well be so. But so are many other things we are bound to take seriously in the course of living our lives. Our instincts tell us that the problem of sexual self-possession is close to the heart of the question of virtue; that is to say, it deeply concerns how we are to live our lives as meaningful and worthwhile wholes.

This instinctual association of sex with virtue has been articulated within the ordered tradition of Christian teaching, where it has been situated within the frame of divine grace and the redemption of broken humanity. That is why it is in the Church that the anguished debate goes on in our own times about the meaning and value of gay sex. Apparently there is no other ordered discourse for which the question of virtue and the question of sexual self-possession are woven together as they are in the Church’s discourse, and as they certainly are in our experience of ourselves. This much at least, then, must be said in the Church’s favor, before we get into the usual hand-wringing and deploring: whether persuasively or unpersuasively, perceptively or unperceptively, the Church treats seriously of difficulties that arise in all seriousness within lived human experience. There is nothing to be ashamed of in the bare fact of the Church’s engagement, often unsupported, with this debate.

I want to begin by saying a word about one of many books that has appeared in recent years advocating a permissive approach to same-sex relations. It is a book I take to be of intellectual seriousness, a worthy statement of the kind of approach it favours. It is The Ethics of Sex by Mark D. Jordan.2 In this context I cannot do justice to its strengths as the product of a lively and creative intelligence, but only give a rough idea of how its angle of vision on the question lies. In picking it out for discussion I do not mean to suggest that its angle of vision is that of all gay Christians, or even most. I choose it for three reasons. The first is simply that there ought always to be some clearly stated position on the table when non-gay Christians discuss this topic, since otherwise they fall into the way of depicting the gay Christian to fit their own fears or theories. This debate would make more progress, I think, if everybody who joined in would follow this simple precaution. No contribution can bring us further forward if it represents its opponents unbelievably. The second reason is that it is specially important to attend to what gay Christians say about their position, not merely to what pro-gay Christians say. The advocacy of the cause has often fallen to non-gay Christians of liberal convictions, who bring to the discussion their own agenda, usually of an emancipationist or rights-oriented kind, and are more interested in gays as victims of persecution than as bearers of a distinct experience that can be of importance and interest in its own right. The voice of Mark Jordan brings a very different set of concerns to the fore from such liberal advocates as my former colleague Marilyn McCord Adams.3 Non-gays need to attend to what is offered for Christian understanding out of the gay experience. My third reason is that this book sets a high value on thematizing the experience of sexuality within a context of prayer and discipleship. Though passionately critical of much traditional teaching, it makes no suggestion that there ought to be no Christian teaching on this subject, nor does it ever suggest that the controversy is about nothing at all. It hopes to free what Christians think and say and teach about sex from certain supposed shackles and inhibitions; it does not hope to free Christians from thinking and speaking and teaching about sex altogether.

Jordan describes his contribution as an “attack upon Christendom.” Yet he does not wish his attack to be taken for an angry one. Much that parades as “gay” comes out, in fact, as sullen and sour. But this, he hopes, is to be a happy attack, designed to free Christian sexual ethics from the unenviable fate that has befallen it of being a “handbook for the police.” Studying the history of the Christian tradition, Jordan discovers there a wide variety of “sexual speeches,” as he calls them, which have in common a concern to uphold a certain regulation of sexuality. The account he gives of this is heavily dependent on Michel Foucault, whose three “hypotheses” about the history of the Western sexual tradition Jordan takes up with approval: 1) the West has over-produced discourse about sex; 2) the discourse has very quickly taken a scientific form—in contrast to the Eastern “art of the erotic”; 3) the demands of a science of sex have been imposed by an ensemble of mechanisms of power, the pastorate. But, Jordan proceeds, the situation has radically altered now that the churches have fallen from their positions of power. The churches’ relation to secular bureaucracies in the exercise of “biopower” has been turned upside down. “National and transnational bureaucracies are ever more efficiently involved in the regulation of citizen-sexuality,” he tells us; and the task of the churches in this situation is not to maintain an ever-shrinking slice of the regulatory cake, but to warn people against docility.4 There is no place, he insists, for talk of “rights.” Codifying rights is simply the obverse of codifying sins. What is at fault is precisely the exercise of codification. Christian sexual ethics has to be the salvific and liberating teaching of God displayed through the sexual lives of Christians.

Jordan believes that we now stand at the beginning of a new, revolutionary Christian sexual ethics. But how can the revolution take responsibility for the Christian past? Christian discourse on sex has revolved around two themes, nature and shame. But “nature” is an ideology, immune from refutation. The rule must be: respond not to what it says, but to how it operates. So the past discourses must be dumped and a new theological strategy put in place, which is to attend to the demands of negative or apophatic theology. God teaches mankind progressively and in parables. More time is needed, then, to see what God is teaching in the sexual lives of Christian believers, but in the meantime Christian ethics has something to do as well as attacking Christendom. It must be fashioning hopeful speeches to replace the “ugly” ones of the past, speeches whose theme is pleasure.5 Christian writers of the past have pronounced “calumnies” about erotic pleasure. But pleasure should be understood as an approach to the original created order. There are spiritual resources within the Christian tradition for celebrating pleasure: mystical writings are famously erotic, a fact that should not be explained away as mere allegory. Liturgical worship is full of physical pleasures of sound and sight. Our union with God in prayer is the fulfilment of our capacity for erotic pleasure. Intense private prayer resembles masturbation, while sado-masochistic satisfaction resembles ascetic discipline. Even moral theology, Jordan promises—and how can I be indifferent to this?—may be beautiful in its rhetorical craft and persuasive force. But pleasure is not the end of it. Talk about sex has always been about identities, and the task of the new Christian ethic is to construct Christian identities within which the erotic is fully integrated.

Let me offer three preliminary words of general comment about this program, before I pursue some of the major questions it raises in a less direct way. First of all (and to repeat), it is not a manifesto about justice or rights or remedying the historical wrongs of a persecuted class. The agenda Jordan sets before us is that of thinking about our common sexuality, and how ...

Table of contents

• Human Sexuality and the Nuptial Mystery
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Précis
• Sermon: On the Nature of Desire
• Part 1: Desire, Vocation, and Friendship
• Part 2: The Nuptial Mystery