To read the article that this post is summarizing with click here. A friend told me that it has been said that these ten (or so) pages by Rowan Williams are the best ever written on sexuality. That’s a helpful starting place. William’s article is not explicitly about same-sex relationships. It’s about sexuality. For this reason, it may be more pertinent. Both Richard Hays and Peter Gomes (both of whom I’ve used extensively in these posts) conclude their respective writings on same-sex relationships by noting that the larger problem with the church is that we don’t know how to talk or think about the more foundational issue of human sexuality.
Williams begins by offering an image derived from Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. “This Body’s Grace” describes the process by which one of the main characters from Scott’s story, Sarah, discovers that her body can be the cause of happiness to another.
Williams leans heavily on the work of Thomas Nagel to develop this point. Nagel submits that, “my arousal and desire must become the cause of someone else’s desire.” Or we might say it’s insufficient for an individual to simply have an attraction towards another. If this attraction is not perceived and responded to it is nothing more than “a passing chance.”
This means sexuality involves great risk. “For my desire to persist and have some hope of fulfillment, it must be exposed to the risks of being seen by its object,” (Nagel). Ears will perk up when Williams then states that in sexual relation we are no longer in charge of what we are … “I cannot of myself satisfy my wants without distorting or trivializing them … for my body to be the cause of joy, the end of homecoming, for me, it must be there for someone else, be perceived, accepted, nurtured; and that means being given over to the creation of joy in that other, because only as directed to the enjoyment, the happiness, of the other does it become unreservedly lovable,” (Williams). We are pleased because we are pleasing.
This forms the healthiest possible understanding and purpose of sexual encounter and consequently enables us to speak meaningfully about what is sexually perverse.
In terms of solitary sexual activity Williams acknowledges that this works at the level of release of tension and particularly localized pleasure, but because Williams is arguing the primary goal of this practice is being perceived beyond oneself in way that changes one’s self-awareness, solitary sexual practice does nothing for one’s formation in terms of process and relation and says little about grace. Here we can see the real tragedy with the consumption of pornography. In its most theological basic description, it stands antithetical to the communal nature of the Trinity and the Christian community, and it stands opposed to the celebration of creation through the incarnational practice of enjoying the other in an embodied way.
More troublesome though is the travesty of the asymmetrical sexual relationships. Relationships that leave one agent without any control or meaningful participation and the other in complete control are problematic for just that reason, namely they “only permit limited awareness of the embodiment of the other,” i.e. rape, pedophilia and bestiality. In all of these the required exposure that makes for formation is absent from dominant partner and stolen from the passive partner. Here Williams stings us a bit when he says, “incidentally, if this suggests that, in a great many cultural settings, the social licensed norm of heterosexual intercourse is a ‘perversion’ – well, that is a perfectly serious suggestion … “ I might suggest we consider Doug Wilson’s book and the ethos of most American beer commercials for starters. Later Williams will say, “much more damage is done to this by the insistence on a fantasy version of heterosexual marriage as the solitary ideal, when the facts of the situation are that an; enormous number of ‘sanctioned’ unions are a framework for violence and human destructiveness on a disturbing scale: sexual union is not delivered from moral danger and ambiguity by satisfying a formal socio-religious criterion.”
With this understanding we can now get to the heart of Williams’s proposal. He suggests, “we have here a picture of what sexuality might mean at its most comprehensive; and the moral question I suspect, ought to be one of how much we want our sexual activity to communicate, how much we want it to display a breadth of human possibility and a sense of the body’s capacity to heal and enlarge the life of other subjects.”
As was said above, this form of sexual engagement involves risk. But the risk should be welcomed. So much so that Williams argues that sexual “perversion” is sexuality without risk. Therefore, “the discovery of sexual joy and of a pattern of living in which that joy is accessible must involve the insecurities of ‘exposed spontaneity’: the experience of misunderstanding or of the discover (rapid or slow) that his relationship is not about joy – these bearable, if at all, because at least they have changed the possibilities of our lives in a way which may still point to what joy might be.” And here Williams offers us a profound insight. “I can only fully discover the body’s grace in taking time, the time needed for a mutual recognition that my partner and I are not simply passive instruments to each other.” Twice in my fifteen years as a pastor I preached on sex and its demand for covenantal relationship … because I have argued Trinitarian ecstasy demands, or can only flourish and be made sense of, inside the context of Trinitarian self-sacrificial love. But here is a pragmatic reason that unpacks the theological. Very simply because that takes time. This is the problem with one-night stands, sexual promiscuity and other forms of sexual participation; namely they forget what sex really is. They don’t provide the commitment and consequential time for mutual sexual self-giving to do its work.
All of this though only makes sense for Williams in so far as it is connected to a deeper language about grace to start with. More specifically a language of grace that is dependent upon a language about creation and redemption. “To be formed in our humanity by the loving delight of another is an experience whose contours we can identify most clearly and hopefully if we have also learned or are learning about being the object of the causeless loving delight of God, being the object of God’s love for God through incorporation into the delight of God, being the object of God’s love for God through incorporation into the community of God’s Spirit and the taking-on of the identify of God’s child.”
Williams’s critique of conventional heterosexual ethics then, is that it ignores the most important question, the question about human meaning within sexuality. Instead “all we need to know is that sexual activity is licensed in one context and in no other.” At the heart of Williams’s objection is his suspicion that our great anxiety with same-sex relationships is that they force us to ask deeper questions about the nature of sexuality. “[Heterosexual] sex has, in principle, the more tangible goal of producing children. Its justification is more concrete than that.” Williams describes here. “These things accommodate the insecurity of our desire.”
In what follows Williams offers a key hermeneutical move. “The odd thing is that this sense of meaning [read the body’s grace here] for sexuality beyond biological reproduction is the one foremost in the biblical use of sexual metaphors for God’s relation to humanity.” I offer one of his examples. Hosea, Williams argues, subverts the “God-and-the-land clichés of Near Eastern cults: God is not the potent male sower of seed but the tormented lover, and the gift of the land’s fertility is condition upon the hurts of unfaithfulness and rejection of being healed.”
To do him justice, I should include much more of what Williams has said, but the basics can be gathered from what has been written above.
Here is my quick response. Though I agree with him that there is a great deal of discomfort within Evangelicalism in regard to speaking about sexuality, I don’t think Evangelicals are guilty of a lackluster understanding of sex that is conditioned on an Augustinian need for reproduction. To make my point I’ll cite a favorite liberal whipping boy, John Eldridge, who I take to be a quintessential expression of an evangelical sexual understanding. In his book Love & War, which is co-authored with his wife Stasi they write
“You need to do it. Often. In a way you both enjoy it. Immensely.
If this isn’t the case, then you need to deal with why it isn’t.
‘Cause you need to do it. Often. In a way you both enjoy it. Immensely.”[1]
Or Rob Bell, who is no longer evangelical in any sense of the word, but who for a long time represented emerging? Christianity, writes:
“For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that’s only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all of the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God.”[2]
Neither the Eldredge nor Bell speak of timidly about sex nor do they speak about sex cavalierly because they think we are to fulfill anthropological mandate laid out in the Genesis story. Still, I don’t think either of the conceptions of sexuality they have spelled out here are as sophisticated as Williams’s.
What is implied in Williams’s suggestion is this. If the point of sex is not ultimately reproduction, orgasms, or even our own joy, but rather a tool for formation [my words not his], then why should that be restricted to heterosexual participants. It would seem given the amount of sexual fulfillment celibate individuals can have [3] and given the lack of sexual fulfillment among dysfunctional heterosexual relationships, we are forced to do analysis that judges the value of sexual encounter based on more than the connection of penis and vagina blessed by a local religious figure. [4]
I suspect conservative readers will find this hermeneutical approach, which is undoubtedly a philosophical endeavor before it is exegetical, wanting. And yet I don’t think his point can be dismissed. The heart of the Christian story is God, through the person of Jesus, rectifying the world to Himself. Bible stories teach us that God, in God’s sovereignty, can use anything or anyone God chooses, to form us. Talking donkeys, prostitutes, naked prophets, eunuchs, and most shockingly towards the end of the story, gentiles, who were previously off limits.
I’ll close with a question that will be taken up tomorrow. Can the Biblical metaphors that represent relationship be extended to include same sex couples?
[1] John and Stasi Eldredge, Love & War, (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2009), 175.
[2] Rob Bell, Sex God, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 42.
[3] Read the article if you are interested. I did not take up this piece of the article in my summary.
[4] I take this to be why I once heard Dallas Willard stated crassly, what we’re really talking about is gay sex. Willard is making the point that we’ve been too reductionist in our ethical analysis.