The Paris Project

Two questions about sexual identity gleaned from the comments section

What is the place of sexuality in human identity?

Excellent point made by someone (KP?) that when it comes to sin, Christians make too much of sexuality, but when it comes to humanity itself, we make too little of it. Along similar lines, I think the place of sexuality in human identity is somewhere between nothing (Gnosticism) and everything (our culture). My concern is that, as a culture, we encourage people to make desire central to their selves. We encourage adolescents and adults to explore and identify sexual desire so they can really know themselves. From Scripture, it seems that desire is God-given, and it's a blessing to a person when good desires are fulfilled, but there are also stories and ideas about desire being wayward. We pray (Phil. 2) that God will shape our wills to desire good things. Desire is important, but it is not an indicator for identity. Identity, as child of God or imago Dei, is bestowed from without, not emergent from the self.

My vision of the church is a place where there is no heterosexuality or homosexuality -- categories of persons based on sexual desire. (As Ben and Hugo noted, it's about sexual behavior and relationships, too, but desire alone is enough to get your ass booted out of the hetero club). I want to deal with desire as desire and nothing more - is what I want consistent with what God wants for my life? Let's just live out of that question, rather than ask a person, "What kind of person are you?" simply because of what they desire. The division of human sexuality into "heterosexual" and "homosexual" (and all variants of these) is a 19th century cultural template that we still live from, and it's just culturally contingent, not necessary. The culture can be different, if we choose to change it.

So sexuality should be viewed as _more_ in the church - as a real part of human experience that God made, that people consider important, and that deserves attention and care. But it should also be viewed as _less_ - less than identity, and not worthy of sheep-and-goat categorization of persons.

What is the place of experience in the development of ethics?

As a woman living in adultery recently said to me, "I think this isn't sin because it feels so right, and there is so much love and goodness in the relationship. And besides, don't people always think their own sins are right? If it seemed wrong and bad, we wouldn't do it." How can I argue with her estimation of her own relationship? And indeed, there may be goodness and love in the relationship. Is the experience of a thing (either by the person doing it or by observers) an accurate measure of its morality? Relevant to our topic, how does what we observe and know of gay people figure into our ethics?

It's important because both "God hates fags" theology and more loving biblical theology forbidding same-sex sex are frequently derived in the absence of any real knowledge of gay people. Meeting a gay person, and seeing that the gay person doesn't have stubs of horns growing on his head, and he's actually a pretty good guy, challenges such theology. Christians frequently change theology because of experience - if gay people are pleasant, then my theology forbidding same-sex sex must be wrong.

I teach Wesley's Quadrilateral to my students, and maybe it's just simplistic - tell me if you've got something better. The equal three sides of the quadrilateral are experience, reason, and church tradition, and the long side is Scripture. Wesley said (well, the quad is actually a derivation of his thought, I believe) that all four of these things inform our understandings, but Scripture gets more weight than the others. This makes sense to me, except for the fact that Scripture is only understood within traditions, and with the help of reason and experience. So then the whole quadrilateral folds on itself. But my point here is that I think experience should not drive theology - it needs at least to be held in tension with other things.

"Homosexuality" - the idea that there is a category of persons made distinct by their sexual orientation - has only existed for 150 years or so. Same-sex sex, however, is forbidden in Scripture (in whatever cultural forms it took at the time), and church tradition has consistently forbidden it as well. Perhaps they're all wrong, but it's a bold step for believers to rewrite orthodoxy - though sometimes it needs to happen. Humility might demand that we might say that our understandings of sexuality are shaped by a oversexed culture, and we desperately need cross-cultural understandings (back in time thru church tradition, and across cultures in our world today) to help us not be overly constrained by our own time and place.

Enough for today? Ya, bastante!