I am Irish. I work for the church. I live in a society that has been ravaged by the movement that I have committed my life to.
Yesterday I wrote about how sexuality informs what it means to be human in the light of Jesus.
Today I want to write about how crucial it is that our theological thinking on sexuality is spot on with grace and light.
In Northern Ireland, Christians tore life apart by getting into bed with two empire identities: London and the United Kingdom and Rome and the Catholic Church. In the Republic, where I am from, we are very slowly lifting up the rug we stand on and finding that the church has systematically terrorized and tortured children for much of the last 20th Century. I grieve that this has happened. More than anything else, it has brought me to my knees and made me question why the hell I’d want to get ordained and start and lead churches. Why would anyone ever listen to a Christian?
So when young Christian theologians are talking about sexuality, that has to be a good thing. But their work has to be good too.
On the back of deviant theology, my country has been ravaged by a celibate leadership in the moral and social sphere. Priests never ran my country’s government. They had much more power than that. If my grandmother had a question to ask, she would ask the priest. If he didn’t know, they could ask the Bishop. But truth existed, resided and dwelt fully in the body of the church.
I believe that celibacy is a valid and beautiful approach to life.
It is not that the priests were celibate. It was that their theology existed (to some degree) to support their celibacy. Irish Catholic women were to follow the path of their Mother Mary. She allegedly never had sex. She was chosen as the “handmaid of the LORD”. It was easy to conflate those two points together to make a compelling case. The LORD blesses those who refrain from the earthly fleshy pleasures of sex. Abraham may have believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness but in my country, Mary didn’t have sex and God begrudgingly credited it to her as righteousness. In a society where women could play no public role, their family home was their only domain. They were encouraged to rule it with the discipline that they brought to their sexual appetites, which were base and savage after all.
Sex and especially pleasure derived from it were not as is often thought taboo. In fact, it was often referenced in sermons from the pulpit. It was actively frowned upon. The New Testament sees marriage as the relationship that makes sex safe and leaves it free to blossom. Ireland, after the terrors of the Famine, saw sex as an inherently unsafe practice. It led to birth which leads to death when we have too many mouths to feed.
A million people died in the Famine. A million emigrated. Yet the explanation for how Ireland went from being 8.1 million strong in the 1840s to 2.8 million in the 1960s is a story of theology gone wrong. Of a culture so terrified of the horrors of the past and the very present myths from their church that the eldest son got the land and everyone else became a nun, a priest, a bachelor or a spinster. Lots is written about whether Irish sexuality is healing to be “normal” again. But near the root of the sexual abuse problems that are rampant in our society today must be the deranged idea that sexuality was somehow irredeemable.
What God becomes, God redeems. The early church taught us that in becoming man, Jesus has underlined in the clearest terms possible that none of us are beyond hope. The fullness of God dwelt bodily in Jesus and so we in our bodies can discover peace with God.
If bloggers out there argue that Jesus wasn’t in some senses a sexual being, they are not just making a theological mis-step. The result is not that they simply lose some credibility in some silly circle of post-grad students. Theological mis-steps lead to communities mis-shapen. The New Testament and most notably the life of Jesus, shows us that celibacy is a valid and fruitful expression of human sexuality. But when we start dislocating sex from the centre of the human life in an effort to somehow argue that celibacy is normative we make the same category of mistake as those Christians who intolerantly insist that since heterosexuality is normative, everything else is deviancy.
The way we view sex in the world at large needs to be critiqued. But the world is on to something when they say sexuality is a part of what it means to be human. They have mis-placed this integral aspect of human life and exaggerated and warped it out of its true proportions. To try and defeat the world by defeating sex is not simply to warp it but destroy it. And my country testifies loudly as a witness against any theology that does not seek to take the pleasure of sex and the fullness of healthy sexuality seriously.
The church and society needs a theology of sex that is unflinchingly hedonistic in the joys it offers, unswervingly communal (against individualistic readings) and radically conservative in its morality. Why? Because I think that is the path laid out for us in the Scriptures, that sees sex as beautiful, marriage as social and sexuality as a coliseum for the celebration of life lived abundantly. The starting place has to be Scripture, which will lead us to a more surprising and more subversive territory than we could ever hope for if we simply posit our positions against the others that already exist.
Your Correspondent, His neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury
I think you may be over simplifying things. Yes bad theology played a part – Jansenism (puritanism in Catholic clothing) imported from France – but there were other factors. The Irish bishops set about rebuilding the Catholic presence in Ireland after four hundred years of English Protestant rule which had devastated the Church and the nation. The majority of the people were poorly educated peasants and the ruling nation was undergoing massive industrialization. The famine had a huge impact as you rightly say. Emergent nationalism lent a lot of force to the idea that the Irish were going to do it better than the British. The attempt to solve the problem of so many homeless children and so much squalor on an industrial scale coupled with Victorian morality and socio-political attitudes created a breeding and hunting ground for the deviant. As the Catholic middle classes grew they attracted (demanded) the better teachers (lay and religious) and the mad, the bad and the deviant gathered around the vulnerable ones, the children Irish society wanted to forget (and still does). Part of this tragedy is that the Christian faith did not confront this. The Church in Ireland lacked the wherewithal to deal effectively with abuse. Unfortunately what most people think is Catholicism is only a pale shadow of the real thing (I suppose that can be said of any part of the Christian community). Jansenism reappears as an over-commitment to Social Justice at the expense of personal faith in and relationship with Christ, of the Sacraments and of the other dimensions of Christianity. Sorry for the long post. Keep up the good work and good luck with your studies.
Hey Tom. Thanks for the comment. Please don’t apologise!
I have certainly over-simplified and acknowledge there is a much bigger story to tell than I managed in my 1000 words. But I was trying to remind fellow young church leaders and theologians that it is crucially important that the conclusions we might tentatively reach about a theology of the body must be lit right the way through with grace because in a very sharp way, bad theology of sex will genuinely destroy lives.
And as we have seen in our country, devastate Christian witness.
There are much more factors at work for why we let what happened happen but I suppose the point I was trying to make was that it is illustrative for us on how important it is to not let theology in this area become an intellectual game (not that this should be permitted anywhere!)
[Also, way off tangent, am I way off base thinking that the constant connection that is made between Jansenism and Puritans is seriously flawed?]