[Abstracted from the Introduction to Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, J. Nelson and S. Longfellow, Eds., John Knox Press, 1994. pp. xiii - 8.]
Introduction to Sexuality and the Sacred
First, sexuality is a far more comprehensive matter, broader, richer, and more fundamental to our human existence than simply genital sex. And second, our sexuality is intended by God to be neither incidental to, nor detrimental to, our spirituality, but rather a fully integrated and basic dimension of that spirituality .
What, then, are the central meanings of human sexuality? We have approached the selection of articles with several basic assumptions, some of which are about the nature of sexuality itself. While sexuality may well include our desires for experiencing and sharing genital pleasure, it is far more than this. More fundamentally and inclusively, it is who we are as bodyselves--selves who experience the ambiguities of both "having" and "being" bodies. Sexuality embraces our ways of being in the world as persons embodied with biological femaleness or maleness and with internalized understandings of what these genders mean. Sexuality includes our erotic orientations-our attractions to the other sex, to the same sex, or to both. Sexuality includes the range of feelings, interpretations, and behaviors through which we express our capacities for sensuous relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the world. While sexuality is always rooted in our bodily realities, it is much larger than these, always involving our minds, our feelings, our wills, our memories, indeed our self-understandings and powers as embodied persons.
Theologically, we believe that human sexuality, while including God's gift of the procreative capacity, is most fundamentally the divine invitation to find our destinies not in loneliness but in deep connection. To the degree that it is free from the distortions of unjust and abusive power relations, we experience our sexuality as the basic eros of our humanness that urges, invites, and lures us out of our loneliness into intimate communication and communion with God and the world. It is instructive to remember that the word "sexuality" itself comes from the Latin sexus, probably akin to the Latin secare, meaning to cut or divide--suggesting incompleteness seeking wholeness and connection that reaches through and beyond our differences and divisions. Sexuality, in sum, is the physiological and emotional grounding of our capacities to love.
Thus it is impossible for the authors of the following articles to speak of sexuality without speaking, at the same time, of spirituality. Spirituality can be simply defined as signifying the response of our whole beings to what we perceive as the sacred in our midst. And, precisely because it is the response of our whole beings, our sexuality is inevitably involved.
Most writers in this volume speak out of a Christian spirituality wherein the sacred power is God as known through the community of Jesus Christ. Readers will detect that these writers commonly are making incarnationalist assumptions. That is, they assume that God's very being still becomes flesh and dwells among us full of grace and truth. And in becoming flesh God is revealed through the sexual dimensions of our lives.
Making this assumption, the writers engage in sexual theology. Throughout most of Christian history the vast majority of theologians who wrote about sexuality tried to approach the subject from one direction only: they began with affirmations and assertions of the faith (from the scriptures, from doctrines, from churchly teachings, and so on) and then applied those to human sexuality. Now, theologians such as those included here are assuming that the other direction of inquiry is important as well: What does our sexual experience reveal about God? about the ways we understand the gospel? about the ways we read scripture and tradition and attempt to live out the faith?
This means a discovery of the church as a sexual community, another theme common to these authors. If through most of Christian history the church has understood sexuality either as incidental to or detrimental to its life, a new understanding has emerged-largely spurred by feminist theologians and by gay and lesbian theologians. Those oppressed or discounted because of their sexuality have long known that the church has always been, among other things a sexual community. It has incorporated "a host of sexual understandings--for good and for ill--into its language and images, into its worship and leadership patterns, into its assumptions about power and morality, and into its definitions of membership. The church has been doing this, often quite unconsciously, while at the same time believing that it could write and teach about sexuality from a standpoint of faith quite unaffected by sexual assumptions. Now many of us believe differently. Recognizing that at the same time the church is a community of faith, worship, and service it is also a sexual community opens the door to new consciousness of sexual oppressions and new possibilities for life-giving transformations.
Sexuality is invariably social and public in its implications. The feminist insight that "the personal is political" marks the insights of the authors included here. When they speak of "intimacy," for example, they exhibit a common understanding that our sexuality invites us to intimacy not only with the beloved person but also with all creation. It is intimacy marked by right relationships, mutual power, and justice in our social structures.
There are several related topics that we have not covered. One group is that of certain sexual subjects we deem beyond the scope of this volume, particularly abortion, contraception, sterilization, and reproductive technologies. Again, space limitations make it impossible to do justice to the range and complexity of interpretations of these issues. Moreover, bioethical anthologies on these subjects are readily available elsewhere. Secondly, we had wished to include certain important subjects, but we were disappointed in the dearth of adequate theological treatments of them. These include issues as diverse as childhood sexuality, bisexuality, and certain sexual variations (for example, transsexualism and transvestism).
Without any exaggeration, we can safely say that the past decades are without parallel in the long history of the church in terms of the amount of critical focus on sexuality issues.
Introduction to Part One
What does our human sexuality mean? That is the larger question addressed throughout this volume. In this section we focus on two background questions. The first is this: From whence come those meanings? Are they intrinsic to our sexuality? just there? implanted by our Creator? On the other hand, do we create those meanings through our interaction with others? Or, in some sense are both of these things true? The second question is; this: Regardless of the source of those sexual meanings, what are the important and appropriate sources for Christians to use in discerning them?
Turning to the first question, the two theories currently vying with each other are social constructionism and essentialism. Social constructionism emphasizes our active roles as human agents deeply influenced by our social relations in structuring or "constructing" our sexual meanings and values. While our capacities to feel and to act sexually are, of course, rooted in the sexual and bodily realities that are given to us, the meanings of those feelings and expressions vary greatly over time and among different cultures. For example, whereas persons in most cultures consider a kiss on the lips to be a positively charged sexual gesture, some Inuits find such kisses repulsive, and not the least bit erotic. In another example, traditional native Americans avoid making eye contact during conversation, a practice that may seem evasive to European Americans. The Indians, however, regard sustained eye contact as rude and invasive. Thus, the social constructionists say, we socially attach symbolic meanings to our bodily and sexual expressions, meanings that are not intrinsically coded into people.
In contrast, the essentialists, or empiricists, emphasize the objectively definable reality of sexual and bodily meanings. The body, they claim, has its intrinsic and given meanings, quite apart from whatever we happen to believe about it. Though sexuality may well be acted out differently in various times and places, there is something universal and constant about its core reality. For example, the official Roman Catholic understanding of natural law states that sexual expression has an intrinsically procreative meaning. Hence, all sexual expressions (such as contraceptive sex, oral sex, anal sex, and masturbation) that deliberately frustrate the procreative possibility are unnatural-against the given, essential nature of our human sexuality.
Carter Heyward's essay makes a strong case for social constructionism. She maintains that "our sexual relations, indeed our sexual feelings, have been shaped by historical forces--the same contingencies, tensions, politics, movements, and social concerns that have shaped our cultures, value systems, and daily lives." She argues that a historical reading of sexuality is an interpretation of power--whether that is power over other persons or mutually empowering relationships. If we accept the radical relationality and historicity of who we are as persons, we will not succumb to the belief that our sexuality is fixed or unchanging. Such a social and historical perspective, she believes, frames our sexual ethics around issues of what we do rather than what we are.
Lisa Sowle Cahill frames the question with a more essentialist emphasis. The problem, she says, is that in the unity of our personhood we experience our sexuality as a duality-both physical and spiritual. Sex is physical, urgent, and pervasive. It is also an avenue for the deep expression of emotion and spirituality among persons. Our sexuality cannot be reduced simply to its procreative potential or its physical pleasure, for it is also a constituent of those relationships that are most distinctively human. Thus, "It is possible to define at least approximately, some ‘essential’ or ‘ideal’ meaning of sexuality, despite actual historical distortions or adaptations of it in the human sexual reality, and despite the limits of the human mind in seeking to discover it." Cahill joins those philosophers and theologians who wish "to affirm the essential character of sex in relation to human being, the meaning of sex as expression of interpersonal relation as well as procreation, and the equal dignity of man and woman."
One way of grasping the difference between these two writers is to ask, What are they fundamentally worried about? Heyward is concerned that essentialism is often used to oppress persons (for example, lesbians and gay men) whose sexuality does not conform to certain notions of a given and unvarying truth of sexuality (for example, procreation). Cahill, on the other hand, is more concerned that without claiming something essentially given about sexuality we fall into an utter relativism about its meanings, a relativism incompatible with Christian faith.
Both authors, we believe, have some truth in their positions. We have chosen to represent both social constructionists and essentialists throughout this volume, though with some accent on the former. But the positions need not be seen as polar opposites. We emphasize constructionism because we believe our sexuality is, indeed, subject to a vast range of socially constructed meanings, and those meanings are often related to social power. Hence, we believe that the major focus for our theological and ethical questions should be on the meanings of our ways of being sexual, not upon the physical contours of specific acts. Further, if sexual meanings are socially constructed, they can also be reconstructed in ways that are more just, more whole, more life-giving. By the same token (and here is the truth of an essentialist emphasis), sexual meanings are not entirely relative. There is something "given" in our sexuality--not intrinsically embedded in certain specific acts, but intended by God for our sexual relationship--thatour relationships be those marked by justice, wholeness, and life-giving love.
Turning to the second major question, we ask, With what sources might we work as we do our sexual theology? Cahill points to four complementary sources for Christians to use in sorting out the problematic qualities of sex. They are (1) the Bible (the foundational texts of the community), (2) tradition (the historic teachings, practices, and understandings of the church), (3) philosophical accounts of essential humanity (normative accounts of what human beings truly ought to be), and (4) descriptive accounts of what actually is the case regarding our sexuality. All four of these, she maintains, are indispensable and, indeed, mutually correcting. Even though it is never a simple matter, a faithful and judicious balancing of these sources is what we need. A slightly different way of naming these four ("the Wesleyan quadrilateral") will be illustrated in James B. Nelson's article on homosexuality in part 5.
The importance of these mutually complementary and mutually correcting sources has been recognized in various parts of the Christian community, even though some Christians emphasize one more than the others. Many Protestants have attempted to turn almost exclusively to the Bible as their authority. L. William Countryman demonstrates the futility of this approach but also argues that the scriptures are powerfully relevant.
Countryman argues that the Bible's specificsexual norms are largely alien and irrelevant to us today, for the significant texts dealing with sexual morality were framed by purity and property systems that we have, with good reason, abandoned. Ancient purity laws with a particular focus on bodily boundaries dealt with those actions deemed clean or dirty, pure or impure. Our biblical forebears' main concern in these laws was not the ethical quality of the sexual acts as such, but what certain bodily acts symbolized regarding the boundaries of the chosen, holy people. When in the course of time the gospel message cast into doubt the principle of the purity system, the New Testament writers still appealed to another principle--property. The patriarchal household, with its male ownership of women and children, was kept as the building block of the sexual property system. Thus, adultery, fornication, and incest were defined as violations of sexual ownership and family lineage.
While those ancient systems of purity and property are no longer appropriate for us, Countryman argues that there is great scriptural relevance for sexual theology and ethics. The Bible is important precisely because it is alien to our historical-cultural situation and therefore relativizes it. The scriptures relativize our sexual norms to make fresh room for the gospel of God's grace. Further, the Bible shows how the grace of God broke into the self-sufficiency of another culture, and hence how it can shatter our own self-sufficiency. Countryman then proposes a set of basic principles along with some "derived guidelines" to illustrate how the scripture can subject our own sexual patterns and institutions to the gospel. His essay thus argues for the critical importance of scripture in doing sexual theology, without claiming that scripture alone is sufficient.
Margaret Farley addresses tradition by noting that "the teachings within the Christian tradition regarding human sexuality are complex, subject to multiple outside influences, and expressive of change and development through succeeding generations of Christians." Careful attention to tradition helps us graspwhy and how we have come to our present positions and confusions about sexuality.
An important illustration of this is Farley's summary of the Gnostic and Stoic influences. Both Gnosticism and Stoicism were profoundly dualistic in their understandings of human nature. Both sharply separated spirit from body, with the spirit believed to be good and eternal while the body was seen as mortal, suspect, and the particular locus of evil. Gnosticism, however, led to two different extremes-the complete rejection of sex and the embrace of sexual licentiousness. It was in the Stoic justification of sexual intercourse for the sole purpose of procreation that early Christians found the answer to the Gnostics. That justification allowed them to affirm procreation as the central rationale for sex and still to maintain the spiritual superiority of virginity. With this, as Farley observes, "the direction of Christian sexual ethics was set for centuries to come." Though such Stoic reasoning may seem archaic and foreign to modern Christians, few of us have been untouched by religious suspicions regarding sexuality per se, and by negative evaluations of those sexual acts that are inherently non-procreative, such as oral sex, masturbation, and homosexual intercourse. Tradition, indeed, helps us understand why we are as we are.
This same illustration, however, suggests a second contribution of tradition. Late Hellenistic dualism as expressed in both Gnosticism and Stoicism did not originate in Jewish or Christian sources. Yet it profoundly influenced all subsequent Christian understandings of sexuality. Thus, grasping something of the tradition helps us comprehend the ways in which sexual theology is never ‘pure,’ but always finds its shaping in relation to the cultural contexts in which Christians live. Moreover, understanding of our religious heritage assists us to recognize ways in which the tradition itself is susceptible not only to modifications but also to fundamental shifts regarding human sexuality. Farley points out how the shift away from the centrality of the procreative norm began in the fifteenth century, when certain theologians began to justify the good of sexual pleasure itself for the well-being of persons. A century later, in the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin affirmed that "the greatest good of marriage and sex is the mutual society that is formed between husband and wife." Hence, tradition is neither monolithic nor unchanging.