Sex is not a symbol

some light thoughts for a Tuesday.

I have tried to write a little bit (here and here and here) about the sorts of errors I see in much of the theological discussion about contraception. I wrote these pieces at a bit of a remove, not being direct about where I saw these errors propagated, or even what they exactly were. I did this because I was trying to avoid some of the uncomfortable reaction that follows having these conversations directly, and also probably because writing at a remove is an intellectual vice of mine.

Many conversations, it seems to me, that suggest an alternative to Roman Catholic positions on matters of life or doctrine set up a pair of straw men. It is often the Roman Catholic view that claims priority in origin and truthfulness, with the Protestant view a johnny-come-lately. Protestantism, alternately, is blamed for “rampant individualism”, “consumer capitalism”, and the abuse of technology. I once even heard a lecture where Brad Gregory blamed Protestantism for the… surveillance wing of the CIA, which was both interesting and a little rich.

One of the traits of much current ideas-type writing is that it seeks a target on which to place the ills of the “modern world”. (A note, here- my aim is to no longer use “the modern world” in my writing, because I do not know what it means). Protestantism makes an easy target. But making a straw man out of a tradition that is as varied geographically, historically, and theologically as Protestantism is means that such a target is both easy and useless. Because Protestantism does not have a teaching office, literally anything can be attributed to its failures of teaching. If you know one Baptist who harms his wife, Protestantism can be said to allow it, insofar as it does not have the official, centralized authority to restrain it. (Church discipline exists, in theory, but also it exists largely in theory).

Because Protestantism is such an easy target, placing the blame on it for secular individualism would place a very heavy burden of proof on the person making the argument. How would a person prove such a statement? They can’t. Lacking such proof, we often end up operating largely on vibes.

If a person lacked good teaching about the body, or conception, or menstruation, it is easy for them to react to difficulties in these areas and look for a place to blame. “The Church” is an easy target. But I am not so sure that “the Church” is the place for teaching about contraception, simply because I am not sure that there is a one-size-fits-all teaching on the matter.

In a well written piece out today entitled Protestants and the Pill, Kate Shelton writes about a trend she observes of lessening use of hormonal contraception among Protestants. She echoed observations in this really thoughtful piece at Christianity Today. As the piece at CT observed, women’s fertility is varied and complex, and we should absolutely support more research into ways to alleviate the burden of infertility. If we believe children are a gift, Christians should support prudent ways to support couples with fertility challenges pursuing this good.

But there are a few threads in some of the conversations swirling about fertility that I think we might pull on. For one, marriage, and not sex, is the metaphor for union between God and humans. This matters quite a bit!

See this bit, from Shelton’s piece:

She compared the marital act to participation in Eucharistic union with Christ: “We are to take and eat and to be united with him, and whether we believe that’s symbolic or literal or somewhere in between, there’s a very real sense in which he has given himself to us on the marriage bed of the cross.”

Ben Jefferies, like ­many Protestants I’ve talked to, found his way into thinking about contraception through the writings of Pope John Paul II, which he praises for expressing a poetic and poignant view of marriage, despite “being written by a chaste man who was never married.”

What is interesting to me from these observations is that the writings of Pope John Paul II are praised as poetic and poignant, but the “poetic” view they take- of Christ “giving himself to us on the marriage bed of the cross” makes sex, and not marriage, the place where Christ’s union with the world is imaged. Now, sex certainly does have a place within marriage, but collapsing the site of this union in this way makes sex total. Do you see how this collapse enlarges sexual union, and not marriage itself, as the site of God’s union with the world? That is a theological decision that I wouldn’t share.

Absent an allegorical reading of the Song of Songs (which I think there are good reasons to avoid), much of the nuptial imagery comes much later in the history of interpretation, flourishing with the mystical writings on union with Christ. Sexual renunciation among the earlier virgin martyrs was more about renouncing one’s female sex than inhabiting it. Therefore, to my mind reading sex as an allegory for Christ’s relationship with the Church is a) a theological choice b) made on historical more than biblical grounds, and c) one I don’t personally find to be the best way to think about sex.

Why am I so confident disagreeing with JPII on this (besides the fact that I am not a Catholic)?

For one, because I do think the Bible talks about sex and conception and every thing else related, not as an allegory, but as a real, lived reality that the people of Israel had to mediate.

If you are looking for a discussion of menstruation, you’ll find it in the book of Leviticus. I’d hazard a guess that most churches do not consider these discussions at all in their common life. Alongside teaching about contraception, Shelton’s piece argues that knowledge about menstruation should be taught at the level of the local church. In her words:

It may seem implausible that something as private and, well, human as a menstrual cycle could draw a woman into a deeper relationship with God, with her husband, with her own body.

But the “embodied faith” of Israel did not consider menstruation a means to a deeper relationship with God. (This is what I meant here, by the “pagan” instinct of much modern women’s spirituality.) The idea that menstrual cycles grant us knowledge of God that helps us live in deeper relation to him, and to our own bodies, is not the way the discussion of menstrual cycles worked in ancient Israel. (This is actually a question of how natural theology works, which is a current interest of mine).

In fact, menstruation was a sign, first and foremost, of death. For Israel, the “life was in the blood” (Lev 17:14). What this meant was that when blood was present- either in the slaughtering of an animal, or a corpse, or in childbirth or menstruation- certain cleansing rituals needed to be undertaken in order that this passing of life could be honored.

Leviticus is about marking God’s presence in time. Bodies are miniature microcosms, not symbols as much as they are actual, concrete instantiations of the time-fulness of life. Bodies get old. They age and die. As they do this, they are marked, in time, by the rituals that God proscribed that Israel adhere to.

The cleansing rituals that followed menstruation marked the exit of life from the body. These were not moral rituals- the “uncleanness” that is spoken of is ceremonial, and not ethical. Menstruation as a recurring cycle that women’s bodies participate in is a miniature calendar marking the passing of life from the body. It is not a means to get closer to God, any more than observing aging or death would be. Knowledge of the body, here, is reduced to knowledge of one’s own mortality.

What I object to, most strongly, is a view of God and his workings in the world that relies on a “hidden” order or structure that it is our job to discover. God is present in the world without hiding behind every tree or bush. In saying that sex is a gift, we are saying all that we need to say about it. Making it sacred, for me, actually impedes the kind of divisions being made in Leviticus between the holy and the profane. The profane is simply that which is good, but not good for use in the order of revealed knowledge of God. It is good for its own sake. For it, we can return thanks, joyfully, relishing its gifts- of communion and hospitality, of sexuality and its nourishments, of children if they are granted to us. None of these need to be made holy to be good. That is how we receive the world as gift.