Yes, of course. I bring it up because Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan have been having a go at each other on the subject. Before I get to my own points, I’ll get you up to speed. Sullivan writes:
It’s revealing that for Rod, sex is the first thing that comes to mind after reading my essay. Which kinda proves my point — which is that in the grand scheme of Jesus’ teaching, sex is an extremely minor theme, while the current Catholic and evangelical leadership regards it as a central defining issue.
In responding, Dreher nails two crucial points. First, it’s a bit rich to accuse conservative Christians of being obsessed with sex and sexuality when it’s the pelvic Christian left who started the fight when it got on board with the sexual revolution. Dreher thus writes:
…Andrew himself has made sex and sexuality a defining theme of his own life and writing. It’s interesting how so many liberal Christians accuse conservatives of being obsessed with sex, yet so much of their own writing and activism focuses on sex and sexuality, especially homosexuality. In my old, lily-white Philly neighborhood, there was a mainline Protestant church that posted a banner out front with the rainbow flag, announcing that it was a “welcoming and affirming” congregation. Which is fine, if that’s their thing. I passed that church every day, though, and it finally occurred to me that they never put a banner up announcing that they welcomed black people, or Hispanics. They never put a banner up announcing that they welcomed poor people. For this congregation, being on record as welcoming and affirming gays was a priority. Like I said, if that’s how they roll, that’s how they roll. But I bet every member of that congregation, if polled, would agree that conservative Christians are obsessed with sex and sexuality, unlike themselves.
Second, the claim that Jesus cared more about critiquing wealth and power and promoting peace than teaching about sex simply isn’t true. Dreher again:
…aside from the prosperity gospel people, who really are a threat to the integrity of Christianity, nobody is trying to deny Christian orthodoxy and Gospel teaching on wealth. There is a powerful movement within Western Christianity, across the various churches, especially at the institutional level, to deny Christian orthodoxy on sexuality, including homosexuality, and radically reinvent the teaching. Andrew Sullivan is an especially articulate, if not especially persuasive, advocate of this view. It just won’t wash. It is radically (= at the root) discontinuous with how Christianity has viewed sex, sexuality, and the human person from the beginning. If Andrew wants to say that we need to realize that Jesus was about refusing power, refusing violence, and spurning wealth as a corrupting, I’m more or less on board with that, as is the Christian tradition. It’s when he claims that Jesus didn’t care about sex that I say, “Oh, come on, who are you kidding?”
Here’s where I want to jump in. When I was in the Protestant mainline in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and particularly at Princeton Seminary (from which I received a stellar education), one often encountered the claim that the Bible has 4000+ verses on wealth but only seven on homosexuality. At root, this is Sullivan’s claim: Why should you conservative Christianists care so conspicuously about copulation among the consenting when Jesus continuously confronts the corrupting cancer of the love of Mammon? As Sullivan writes, “in the grand scheme of Jesus’ teaching, sex is an extremely minor theme.”
Sullivan and others thinking along these lines do have a point. Several, in fact. It’s true that many Christians in the West are wealthy beyond belief. If we conservative Christians (so the thinking goes) engage in hermeneutical gymnastics to avoid what appears to be the plain import of the plain sense of Jesus’ teaching on wealth, how can we forbid gay Christians from treating passages seeming to forbid gay sex and relationships in the same way? So too with divorce and remarriage. Jesus’ words in Matthew 5 and 19 seem pretty clear, but conservative evangelical churches nowadays have little problem with divorce and remarriage (and the Catholic Church in the USA seems to have little issue with annulments, given the statistics). At best, some evangelical congregations have formal processes in place to examine situations in which someone is seeking remarriage after a divorce, but in general it’s left up to the conscience of the individuals involved and their pastor — which all too often really means not a well-formed conscience, but disordered desires.
But hypocrisy should not beget further hypocrisy. If conservative Christians have thought and acted in ways contrary to the gospel, that does not mean others may go and do likewise. Rather, we all need to repent, to clean up our act, to adhere ever more faithfully to traditional Christian teaching.
And so we come to Jesus on sex and marriage. A few observations:
First, Jesus was a Jew who inherited Jewish Scripture and tradition. Jesus did not drop out of the sky to bring a brand new set of moral teachings de novo. If he did, perhaps his apparent lack of attention to sex and sexuality would be striking. But the Jesus of the Gospels — especially Matthew, the First Gospel in so many significant ways — is a conservative Jew, as was in all likelihood the so-called historical Jesus behind the Gospels. And whether we’re talking about the historical Jesus or the Jesus of the Gospels, Jesus stands well within the breadth of Jewish tradition. Thus, it’s not true that things Jesus doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time on or doesn’t mention are unimportant. Rather, we should assume that those things in Jewish tradition which Jesus doesn’t overturn or reinterpret are assumed. Sure, Jesus doesn’t outright forbid Andrew Sullivan’s presumed sexual practices in the Gospels. But he doesn’t have to, because Jesus’ Judaism did.
In debates over sexuality people often assume that Jesus came to *forbid* certain behaviors, and if he didn’t forbid something, it’s licit. The principle would be “Scripture permits anything not expressly forbidden.” But why assume that hermeneutical posture? One could also assume that if Jesus didn’t positively affirm something, it ought not be done: “Scripture forbids anything not expressly enjoined.” The fundamental problem consists in assuming that Jesus came simply, or chiefly, to condemn or approve of certain behaviors, as if the Gospels could be reduced to a mere rulebook for life, a code of ethics. Thinking this way rips the richness of the Gospels to shreds and leaves us with a boring bourgeois Jesus easily exploited by Western bourgeois liberals. We’d do better to read Kant on the metaphysics of morals and have more fun enduring his difficult German than to consider such a tedious Christ.
Second, Jesus is radically conservative on marriage, rooting his view in creation. In his teaching on marriage in Matthew 19, Jesus ups the ante over his Jewish contemporaries. Rabbi Shammai, the conservative, taught that a man could divorce his wife only for adultery. Rabbi Hillel, the liberal, taught a man could divorce his wife for many reasons. And later, Rabbi Akiva famously taught that a man could divorce his wife for any reason, “even if he find one fairer than she.” In Matthew 19, Jesus is asked whether a man can divorce his wife for “any cause.” Jesus replies:
Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female [Genesis 1:27], and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” [Genesis 2:24]? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.
Hence the Catholic belief that religious divorce is a metaphysical impossibility given the indissolubility of the sacrament of marriage, and the historic Protestant unease with divorce — until quite recently.
Jesus’ teaching is rooted in creation, a category incumbent upon us all, lest we wish to be Gnostics. Jesus alludes to Genesis 1 and quotes from Genesis 2, and when the Pharisees then ask him to explain just what Moses meant in Deuteronomy 24:1 when he commanded one to give a wife a certificate of divorce when putting her away, Jesus doubles down on Genesis:
For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning [Genesis 1:1] it was not so.
“From the beginning it was not so” — Jesus’ teaching is rooted in Genesis, as Genesis 1 and 2 are foundational for marriage. Moses’ concession in the “second law” of Deuteronomy is part of a law code restraining a reckless and recalcitrant people, and thus Jesus can leapfrog over it back to Genesis 1-2 now that he himself has brought the power to do the demanding things he himself as God on earth demands; he is Emmanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23) and has promised that he is with us always, even to the consummation of the age (Matthew 28:20). Because he is “with us,” we are empowered to live out marriage as Christ intends.
Third, in adverting to the creation accounts of Genesis 1-2, Jesus intends marriage to be fecund. In alluding to Genesis 1:27 and quoting Genesis 2:24, is Jesus evoking all of Genesis 1-2? Many biblical scholars now see biblical allusions and quotations as exercises in metalepsis, a term employed by literary critic John Hollander in The Figure of Echo and adopted and adapted for biblical studies by Richard Hays in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. Metalepsis basically means that when the reader encounters an allusion or quotation, the reader should call to mind not only what is mentioned by the source text but indeed the whole background context of a quotation or allusion.
So, when Jesus adverts to Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, he’s likely adverting to the entirety of Genesis 1-2 as pertains to marriage. And in doing so he’s adverting to the very first command in Scripture, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Marriage, then, isn’t merely a moral union of compatible soulmates but a real union meant to be fecund, meant ideally to issue forth issue — that is, children. This Jesus affirms. And thus the sort of sexuality Sullivan supports misses Jesus’ mark.
Fourth, interpretation isn’t arithmetic. Again, Sullivan claims that “in the grand scheme of Jesus’ teaching, sex is an extremely minor theme.” Even were that true, it wouldn’t mean that Jesus’ teaching on the matter could be ignored. Jesus’ teaching is a symphony of truth, and in any complex and beautiful musical composition, every single note from every single instrument matters, from first violin to the triangle. The parts make up the whole.
But in point of fact sex isn’t an “extremely minor theme” in Jesus’ teaching. Interpretation is not arithmetic. One cannot simply count up verses wherein topics X and Y are mentioned, find X mentioned more often, and dismiss Y. Verses are artificial in any event; the system modern Bibles use was first employed in 1560 in the Geneva Bible. Further, interpretation by arithmetic must necessarily ignore the nuances of Jesus’ words on a given subject in a given context. Indeed, interpretation by arithmetic is not interpretation at all.
Positively, good interpretation involves paying attention not to quantity but to quality, as it were. One must know how something fits into the Scriptural narrative and have a sense of its gravity. Now, Jesus gives his teaching in Matthew, the First Gospel. Whatever one makes of the modern solution to the synoptic problem (how the Gospels are related in literary terms as sources for one another), the Church has held that Matthew is the “First Gospel,” not merely because it was traditionally thought to have been written first, but because it is considered the richest Gospel in many ways. As a Gospel of fulfillment, it is fitting that Matthew begins the New Testament, which fulfills the Old Testament. Further, it presents Jesus’ teaching clearly and substantively; the Church has found it readily useful in teaching and preaching. Moreover, all the major elements of Christian confession are found there — the Incarnation in the Virgin Birth, Jesus’ sacrificial crucifixion, the resurrection. For these and other reasons, Matthew has been reckoned the First Gospel in importance by most Christians in most times and places, whether Catholic or Mennonite. Thus it is no little thing that Jesus addresses marriage in Matthew in particular. There are no “minor themes” in the Church’s First Gospel.
In the same way, Jesus here goes straight to Genesis 1-2, weighty chapters dealing with anthropology: what human beings fundamentally are as male and female and what marriage is.
Now Jesus’ coming means that much of the Old Testament is no longer of direct relevance to Christians; thanks to Jesus, Paul, and James (at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15), bacon double cheeseburgers with milkshakes are on the menu for us. But while the early Christians under the aegis of the Holy Spirit, Scripture, tradition, and Jesus’ revelation decided that things of the Mosaic law that separated Jew and Gentile — kosher eating, Sabbath keeping, circumcision — were no longer binding and indeed inappropriate since the Church is one body with Jew and Gentile on equal footing (cf. Eph. 2:14-15: “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both [Jew and Gentile] one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostilityby abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two”).
But what the early Church doesn’t overturn is traditional Jewish sexual morality. We’ve seen in Matthew 19 the radical view of Jesus the Jew vis-à-vis other Jewish teachers. Consider also Acts 15, where the question of whether Gentile Christians are obliged to keep the law of Moses comes to a head. And the early Church under the leadership of St. James decides Gentile Christians do not need to obey the Mosaic law in its entirety, but they are required to avoid four things:
Therefore my [=St. James] judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God,but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood. (Acts 15:19-20)
Jesus and the early Christians double down on traditional Jewish sexual morality. The rest of the Mosaic law is not binding on Christians — think of how radical that would be for Jews such as the apostles were! — but the prohibition on “sexual immorality” remains. (It’s interesting here too is the link between idolatry and sexual immorality, the precise link Paul makes in Romans 1.) Revisionist hermeneutics notwithstanding, the prohibition on “sexual immorality” precludes the sort of sexuality Sullivan is selling as somehow compatible with following Jesus.
Bottom line: Much of the OT is no longer directly applicable for Christians; we read it through the lens of Jesus and the New Testament. But Jesus affirms Genesis 1-2 in a way more radical than his contemporaries, and the early Church under St. James affirms traditional sexual morality.
———————–
Concluding pastoral postscript: I’m friends and acquaintances with gays and ex-gays and some who are confused who have been trusting enough to confide in me, and so I’m sensitive to the existential dimensions of these questions. In the above, I’ve passionately addressed certain interpretive issues, taking Dreher’s and Sullivan’s exchanges as a point of departure; the pastoral questions remain, and we need to remember that our gay friends and brothers and sisters are dear people beloved by God for whom also Christ died, even when (like Sullivan) their desires result in a contortion of Christian teaching. On this Good Friday, we all stand under the judgment and salvation of the Cross, beggars all.
Great post, but one question about Acts: as a Catholic, I am well aware of the antiquity of the Church’s warnings against sexual immorality.
However, food polluted by idols aren’t such a big deal, and I know for a fact most Christians have no problem eating a rare steak, and several Christian populations have in their traditional cuisine things like bloo sausage, blood pudding, etc. Also, I have never wondered whether the food I have eaten was strangled or not.
So couldn’t Sullivan rightly point out that the vast majority of Christians, including the largest and worldwide most influential denomination (insofar as one can refer to “denominations” in this case), are in fact NOT bound to much of the prohibitions listed there?
In fact, the “blood” thing is one I have seen Jehovah’s Witnesses and Adventists level at Catholics and mainstream (whether mainline or evangelical) Protestants as “proof” that they have abandoned tradition.
Thank you. You’re asking a good question. But I think the formal answer is contained in the post itself: the solution to hypocrisy isn’t more hypocrisy, it’s fidelity. So let’s say that the prohibition of “blood” includes blood sausage (beloved of course by my Teutonic tribesmen). The solution is to stop eating blood sausage. But let’s look at the two prohibitions in question in more detail.
(1) I’m at home and so don’t have my Acts commentaries handy, but I think the prohibition against eating the meat of strangled animals has to do with two things. First, Leviticus 17:10-12 says:
“If any one of the house of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life. Therefore I have said to the people of Israel, No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood.”
Since blood is holy, sacred, set apart for the purposes of atonement, it’s no longer common and thus may not be eaten.
Second, kosher rules dictate that animals ought to be killed as quickly and humanely as possible, which involves cutting the throat with a sharp knife. Strangling an animal is a much slower, and more terrifying, process for the animal.
Third, I don’t know very much about pagan ritual uses of animals, but I do wonder if there’s a cultic concern here, since idolatry and immorality are involved in pagan worship.
(2) As far as the prohibition against “blood” goes, it’s really obscure. Of course, consuming blood would be right out (see Lev 17 above), especially if it’s part of some pagan ritual; again, do all four prohibitions have to do with forcing those Gentiles who would be Christians to sever all connections to pagan religion? Others have suggested that “blood” refers to an absolute prohibition on shedding *human* blood — meaning that the early Church was pacifist.
Now, about rare steak. There’s always some blood in meat, even when it’s slaughtered according to the strictest kosher standards. I gotta think ancient Jews knew this, and God knows this, and so slaughtering the animal in a humane way that drains (most of) the blood suffices.
But blood sausage and blood pudding…if Leviticus 17:10-12 is affirmed in Acts 15:29, then yes, I’d say they’re off the menu.
Yes, but if we followed all Jewish prohibitions on blood, we’d have to accept a lot more of Levitical law. For example, married folk wool have to, like Jews, stay apart during the period of the wife’s menstruation.
Also, I am aware of no major Christian body, especially the Catholic Church, prohibiting the eating of blood pudding, blood sausage, or rare steaks. And while sexual immorality is regarded by all moralists as a grave evil, I have never run across Catholic moralists making broad dietary laws (besides that which has to do with disciplinary practice such as Lenten fasting and abstention). To my knowledge, the larger Orthodo communities also make no such prohibition (though I do know some will not allow a menstruating woman to receive communion), and neither do the traditional Protestant churches.
Again, if blood were really prohibited, why would such strongly Christian (and hierarchically so) cultures as Spain and southern Germany have been able to develop cuisine that makes use of blood quite often? Also, Christian men and women are not prohibited from relations during menstruation (though of course many people find this gross and abstain for that reason), nor are women considered “unclean” at this time (for tge most part).
And Levitical rules re: using blood for sacrifice are obviously no longer in play because of the shedding of Christ’s blood and his perfect sacrifice.
This is why all the other arcane Jewish laws on, for example, mixing milk and meat, are no longer in play.
Seriously, I think that if Christians today were prohibited from blood sausage and blood pudding (neither of which I like, btw) in the same way that they are prohibited from all sexual immorality (grave sins), someone would have “noticed” by now, someone besides the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists (both of whom seem to adopt a great deal of Old Testament stuff that has been dealt with in other ways by historic Christians), that is.
Again, a good and fair question. What we’d need to do is dive into patristic and medieval interpretation and practice, and see what the Church has said. “Blood” is again vague…perhaps once it’s cooked it’s a different matter than raw blood? Just guessing.
I thought that St. Peter’s vision of unclean animals settled all that eating and not eating and such.
Hidden One: Thanks for bringing that up (and Happy Easter, btw). We’re talking about Acts 10. Actually, in the chapter, Peter’s vision isn’t about unclean animals; rather, the vision is an analogy meant to teach Peter Gentiles can now become fully part of the people of God. Cornelius the Centurion, a worshiper of the Jewish God, has a vision telling him to find Peter. Peter has his vision of the unclean animals with the voice telling him not to call unclean what God has called clean. Cornelius and Peter get together, swamp stories, and Peter gets the meaning of the vision:
“Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” (Acts 10:34-35)
The point isn’t that good people go to heaven, but that Gentiles the Jewish God is now accepting Gentiles into his people in and through Jesus:
“While Peter was still saying this [another long sermon], the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word. And the believers from among the circumcised [=Jewish Christians] who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter declared, ‘Can any one forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.” (Acts 10:44-48)
So the vision is about Gentile inclusion, not kosher eating per se.
Now some pro-gay theologians use this passage in support of their program, arguing by analogy that just as the Spirit got Peter over his Gentilophobia, the Spirit is calling us in the 20th/21st century to get over our homophobia. But the crucial difference involves salvation history: in Acts, God is fulfilling his ancient promises to include all nations, not just Gentiles, in his purposes. As God said to Abraham in Genesis 12, “by you all the families of the earth” — not just Israelite/Jewish families — “will be blessed.” Acts 10 is about a particular crucial moment in salvation history — the inclusion of Gentiles, foreseen in the OT — and not about breaking any and all boundaries in general.
Does it change your opinion at all to know that the red fluid from a rare steak is not blood? It’s intramuscular water and myoglobin.
I feel better, I guess, but also foolish.
Father Reardon touched on this in the Daily devotional guide, I believe last year. I understood that Acts 15 happened early, and was meant to quickly dissolve an immediate dispute by highlighting the most important rules required to allow peaceful integration of gentile converts without offending Jewish Christians (not a bad compromise, don’t eat blood and the jews wouldn’t slice ‘n dice new converts). Of course in the years that followed, St. Paul fleshed out the theology involved in gentile grafting in his letters and “overturned” the churches earlier decision regarding dietary laws. Of course there is no epistle in which Paul overturns the need for chastity, so that part of the council’s decision stands. Jewish sexual morality is still the standard, their dietary restrictions are not (Yea for rare steak cheeseburgers, and Easter hams!).
One of the questions here seems to concern how Acts 15 is binding in the long term, and that’s part of a broader question regarding the interpretation and application of conciliar decrees from long ago. I haven’t read Fr Reardon on it, but I’m hesitant to think of it as a temporary, practical solution, for the whole church is gathered to render an important theological decision based on revelation, and the four prohibitions seem to stem from OT passages which deal with sojourners living in Israel. As the Church continues Israel, James applies those passages now to Gentiles who would join themselves to the Israel that is the Church.