Heteronormativity and Christian marriage-idolatry?

Here’s the definition of heteronormativity I am working with:

“By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations – often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality. One of the most conspicuous differences is that it has no parallel, unlike heterosexuality, which organizes homosexuality as its opposite. Because homosexuality can never have the invisible, tacit, society-founding rightness that heterosexuality has, it would not be possible to speak of “homonormativity” in the same sense.” (Berlant and Warner, 2003 p.15)

So how does this relate to the Christian idolatry of marriage? Well what I mean when I say this is the growing sense that the Church has been too quick to glorify marriage and family as ideal states, reflecting the underlying assumption that they are what Berlant and Warner call here ‘a moral accomplishment’. Consequentially, single people are frequently left feeling like lesser citizens in the context of church communities. I think it’s probably less an obvious discursive thing and more a spatial thing – married, fertile people are given privileged spaces/times, the wedding itself, marital counselling, Christening, etc, plus the tendency for married couples to privilege each other/club together, and even more so when children come along. There’s some brilliant research on this stuff by Kristin Aune (google her), who also connects this marriage-glorification and single-belittling tendency to the decline of male participation in church so that single women wanting to get married are left in a difficult and disturbing situation.

So basically, a Christian critique builds on similar ground to that of Warner and many other queer theorists. It is questioning the reasons why we have glorified marriage. The uncomfortable truth is it might be for less Christian reasons and more secular-cultural ones. What if what we think is our nice cosy Christian celebrations of marriage, Christ and the church united etc etc, is actually absorbed from the surrounding culture of heteronormativity and given some smooth poetic sounding theological glosses? Berlant and Warner make a particularly interesting point about ‘life narrative’ being heteronormative, and there’s been lots of interesting queer theoretical work on this point (google Judith Halberstam on ‘queer temporality’). What he means is that we are inculcated into a culture in which our very life narratives are inscribed with a certain set of sexual norms held up to be morally superior (this is the ‘right’ sort of life trajectory, this is the ‘wrong’ one).

Don’t Christians have just as much reason to fight against heteronormativity as queer theorists? Yes but our reasons for doing so are VERY different – and here’s where the denominational and personal differences come out. For your conservative-sexual-ethic-Christians – one man, one woman, marriage is for life kind of people (like myself) would want to ditch heteronormativity because we utterly repudiate the ‘sexual prosperity gospel’ which is basically something like what Foucault called the ‘scientia sexualis’, in short “sort your sex life out and you’ll be an authentic beautiful wonderful coherent individual”, but made worse by the fact that we drag Jesus into our woeful dead-end pursuit of this sexual-coherence-utopia. We have very very good reasons for rejecting this which I won’t rehearse here. For your progressive-sexual-ethic-Christians fighting for churches to bless same sex marriages, they might want to reject heteronormativity mainly because of its excluding of those queer religious folk trying to live their own sexually coherent lives. But I think one the main reasons queer theorists want to reject heteronormativity is because everything ought to be up for grabs and any kind of sexual-cultural hierarchy dictating what is good and what is bad sexual acts, desires, fantasies etc, needs to be ‘queered’ (Gayle Rubin ‘Thinking Sex’ is the classic on this one).

The above is obviously very oversimplified and there will be many exceptions. But the main point I want to draw out is that as Christians we ought to think along the lines of “accept the diagnosis but not the cure”. Queer theory is right to draw attention to how culture privileges some sexualities and excludes others but that doesn’t mean that the answer ought to be the Gayle Rubin ‘radical politics of sexuality’ or the (on the side of the Christian ‘queer theological’ movement) Marcella Althaus-Reid ‘radical inclusion’. However I do think we have something, maybe a lot, to learn from these sometimes uncomfortable and unsettling ways of thinking.

REFERENCES

Althaus-Reid, Marcella, and Lisa Isherwood. 2007. “Thinking Theology and Queer Theory.” Feminist Theology 15 (3): 302–14.

Aune, Kristin, Sonya Sharma, and Giselle Vincett. 2008. Women and Religion in the West : Challenging Secularization. Farnham: Ashgate Pub.

Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. 2003. “Sex in Public.” In Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Robert J Corber and Stephen Valocchi. Oxford: Blackwell.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

Halberstam, Judith. Queer Temporalities and Postmodern Geographies

Rubin, Gayle. 1984. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole Vance, 267–319. Boston: Routledge.

 

 

“Death Comes for the Deconstructionist” by Daniel Taylor – A Review

I was generously given a copy of Death Comes for the Deconstructionist by Marylebone House to review at a significant time in my life – a time when I was, for the first time, engaging with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and the enormously influential schools of thought that they inspired. The “deconstructionism” referenced in the title of the book is a multi-faceted set of ideas that cannot be conveniently summarized. But you could think of them as “post-modernist” in the sense that there is a rejection of any kind of objective meaningfulness to life, given any and all meaning is simply created by us through the systems of language we are beholden to (Derrida’s most famous quote is “there is nothing outside of the text”). Consequentially there are no moral centres in life (again, they are just centre-less linguistic systems), and the only imperative to life is “transgressive play” – playing at stepping over the boundaries of our moral systems to embrace the centre-less, ever-shifting empty chaos of meaning. I found myself wrestling with these ideas, not because they held any kind of appeal to me or worried me that they might in fact be “true” (teehee…), but because I was stumped as to how such ideas could in fact be seriously held by anybody – why this idea would appeal to someone, and how it would actually work itself out in a life.

The genius of Taylor’s novel is that it achieves this very task by imagining the life of a deconstructionist, yet in an ironically “playful” move, the “deconstructionist”, Dr. Pratt, is dead for the entire book, and the plot revolves around the quest to uncover his murderer by a man beholden to the legacy of Dr. Pratt’s ideas. Jon Mote is tormented by his own regrets, yet comforted by his disabled sister Judy’s simple faith and trust. The book comes to a climax as Jon deals the truth about Dr. Pratt’s murder, the origin of his radical ideas, and his own inner demons.

I think Death Comes for the Deconstructionist is a such a rewarding read because of the masterful way Taylor weaves together countless powerful stories about trust, betrayal, faith, depression, madness and regret. But what I loved most about this book, and what I feel to be its most valuable message, is the way that Taylor shows how terrifying, revolutionary philosophies like deconstructionism can be seen simply as ways of making sense of, and dealing with, the everyday horrors of human life and the haunting ghosts of our past.

Buy a copy from Marylebone House here

 

Can we know God through Existence?

What can existence tell us about God? Natural theology is that area of thinking that tries to answer this question. Two possible answers emerge: Studying the world can tell us nothing about God because God is completely different from anything in the world. Or: Because God created the world, it follows that the Creation must inevitably speak to us of our Creator. There are Biblical passages to back up both of these points.

The No-sayer may point us to Exodus 19, in which God appears in thick darkness at the top of a high mountain. Or to Leviticus, which emphasize the sheer distance of God from his people and the impossibility of traversing it. Or to Numbers 23 – “God is not a son of man…”, or perhaps Isaiah 40:28 – “his understanding no-one can fathom”. Even in the New Testament – John 1:18 “No-one has ever seen God… he has made himself known” and 1 Corinthians 13:12 “We see through a glass darkly…”

The Yes-sayer may point us to Psalm 19, in which “the heavens declare the glory of God… day to day pours out speech, night to night reveals knowledge”. Or in the prophetic books, where God is compared to a Shepherd, a Father, and a Husband. And in the New Testament most significantly “For his invisible power attributes namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made”.

When the Bible seems to contradict itself it does not highlight something wrong with the text, but something wrong with us. Indeed, truth most often appears to us in contradictions (think Jesus, both God and Man…). So I think the tension between these texts can be sounded out as the following: Existence can tell us that God is but it cannot tell us what God is. Creation in a sense is an anticipation of the revelation of God in Jesus. We cannot substitute what is revealed to us through the Bible’s testimony to the life of Jesus with our experience and observation of Creation, no matter how profound. Nevertheless, “natural theology” is still important because the created world can and does speak of the Lord. But the order and beauty of Creation is only a tuning note compared to the symphony of God’s initiatory, saving action towards us.

A Poem – The Impossible Call

A poem I wrote as I’ve been studying and writing about love and desire in my degree.

 

Who knew that ‘neath your feet I’d spread

Heavenly clothes, on which I trust you to tread,

Softly, sounding a mouthful of words,

I strain to crane my ears to.

 

Some spiritual score Set my heart to a song:

Would you summon my love From it’s humble estate?

Could you not speak louder

That my deaf ears would hear?

 

Alight with the eyes of the night,

Emptied of all but desire to know,

I come, eyes closed,with

A silent and beautiful music

Humming, warm, winged,

Flowing about my ears.

 

Make of these rags a robe,

My stitching of fevered, fearful passion

A holy, daily, whole-hearted gift,

A mirror of His giving, His dying to live.

Impossibly called, in flight to the miracle,

Our low harmonies creep together,

A true-love’s tryst in the center of the night;

One melody. 

Love Is An Open Door – Why I Love “Frozen”

One of the unifying themes in Disney films is the moment of transfiguration that happens in the encounter of true love. It’s there in Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Cinderella and all the classics. It is so often “true loves first kiss” that changes ugliness into beauty, brings healing and renewal, awakens the dead or sleeping and fulfils the ancient magic. Even beyond Disney countless stories feature this moment of passionate love and it’s transcendent power (its even there in the Matrix!). But the reason I loved Disney’s latest and acclaimed film Frozen so much was not the awesome animation or West-End style big musical numbers, but that it offered a subversion on the theme of love’s transformative power. In so many of these classic Disney films it is the romantic love encounter that brings renewal, breaks the curse/spell/fulfils the prophecy or whatever. But Frozen deliberately puts the emphasis on the sacrificial, sisterly love of Anna and Elsa. The romance takes the backstage and the “deeper magic” is allowed to come out – the love that is, in another moment of genius, described most accurately by the comic relief, “love expert” Olaf: “Love is putting someone else’s needs before yourself”.

The love that Anna feels for Hans is unveiled to be a sham. We are all led to think, along with Christoph, that it is the kiss that will restores Anna and save her from being Frozen. Even when we realise that Hans is the baddie our immediate next thought is “She will have to kiss Christoph!”. The plot twist is not just clever but also incredibly powerful and meaningful. It still offers us a version of the “moment” of love but in an unexpected and moving way. The moment that subverts our expectations unveils our own tendency to default the “power of love” to the romantic love interest. Frozen, in a sense, exposes and critiques our cultures obsession with passionate romance and challenges it deeply with an example of deeper and more powerful love.

“Every story whispers His name”. God invented stories, and narrative is the Bible’s dominant genre. In these Disney films that have captured the hearts of a generation of both young and old it is easy to find the truths of the Gospel vibrating through creative human hearts even when it is not necessarily intended. The transformative moment of love in stories points us to the ultimate “moment” of love that is the hinge point of human history – Good Friday. In Frozen it is made all the more compelling because we see that passion and romance are wonderful and meaningful, but that love means, above all else, sacrifice. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), then, goes beyond hot pink Hollywood smooches and into a man giving up everything, giving his own lifeblood for those he longs to be with forever.

“Some people are worth melting for” – Olaf the Snowman

March Heat

A poem for the changing of the seasons.

 

Your son broke the ice of my winter

and leapt long gold lances of light

through an ice-fired case of fierce frost

towards this shrivelled victim of the years end chill.

 

January-white heat over deep eyelid-darkness lies.

A kiss of warmth to my blue lips; cold heart, like

a jubilee year enfolding the wind-torn tundra

where I counted my debts and wept helpless tears.

 

Its March now, and

to have my wakings met by dawn not darkness

is a tonic to my soul, morning now a joy,

to know I’ll never see a day in the absence of this light.

 

Oh Lord, fold all my shadows into the rhythm of your sun,

and shelter me from all my ancient shatterings,

From whence I break and break myself.

“I Will Love You Unconditionally” – Katy Perry. Agape or Eros?

During the course of writing my last essay on truth I stumbled across some rather thought-provoking ideas that I thought would be worth blogging about. The essay was on Plato’s theory of truth, but seeing as it turned out that his ideas on truth are very closely entwined with his ideas about love, I ended up opening a can of worms that I wasn’t able to close in the course of my work – maybe some of you can help me out here!

“Platonic love” is a lot more complex than the old patronising saying implies. Plato doesn’t seem to really touch upon the notion of unconditional love in his dialogues, which is quite alarming to those of us, Christian or not, who have a pretty clear idea of how this kind of love could happen, whether it comes from Katy Perry songs or from the Bible. Broadly speaking, eros is love that requires reciprocity, and agape is unconditional love that loves in spite of a lack of reciprocity. But Plato seems to think that love is only ever really eros, in that our love is always and necessarily provoked by something “lovely” in what we love. A romance in which I did not care about the features of the woman I was pursuing would not really be very romantic. There is always praising of the beloved’s beauty and character – it is an undeniably central part of human love relationships. And even the most altruistic, non-romantic human relationships must have this element of responsiveness and conditionality.

 This got me thinking about the love of God. I would want to say in the first instance that God’s love is always and necessarily unconditional. It’s the whole foundation of the Gospel – that God loves sinners, that in spite of their messiness and rebellion and failure his love overcomes and conquers through the death of Christ, taking the punishment we deserve, defeating death and opening the way to a wholly  transformational, new life. Even further, it seems that only God can love unconditionally because only God knows everything there is to know about his beloved – it would be tantamount to a claim on omniscience for a human to claim they were able to love unconditionally! And it wouldn’t be right to say that God loves “erotically” because that would imply that we have something desirable to God in and of ourselves. The doctrine of total depravity, based in a large part on the case outlined by Paul in Romans 1-3 does not deny that there is worth and value in humanity, but it does deny that we have anything left that is inherently appealing or desirable to God that causes him to love us. To eros is human, to agape is divine.

 Two things to note then. First of all, it becomes clear why there has been such a destructively negative view of erotic love in the Church through the centuries. If agape is divine, perfect love, eros is human, imperfect, and only a kind of necessity to get kids off the production line and propagate the species. This is wholly unsatisfying, and rightly so, to contemporary Christianity. Second of all, it shows something important about a tension between Protestant and Catholic theology. The famous theological work that highlights the things I noted above, by Lutheran Anders Nygren, has been much maligned in Catholic scholarship. It is easy to see why a Catholic “salvation by works” is more receptive of a divine eros and critical of dualistic divisions between the two kinds of love – a God who responds “erotically” to good works is fitting to a soteriology that depends in part on the responsibility of the human. But, as a Protestant, I would want to strongly deny salvation by works on pretty clear Biblical bases that I won’t labour over here (the origins of Catholicism’s salvation by works seems to me the product of extra-biblical sources… but that’s another post for another time…), yet I also see throughout the Bible pictures of an “erotic” God, a God who is pictured as a passionate and faithful husband, a God rejoicing and singing over his people, a God delighting in the ways of his servants. My instinct is that there should a division like that made by Nygren between the two loves, but I have no idea what this would look like. Questions…

Cycles of Authority, Places of Authority

Here are some very general and hand-wavey but potentially interesting observations on the movement of the locus of authority within the history of ideas and the growth and development of schools of thought.

Stage 1 – The Genius/Sage

Cycles of authority begin with individuals. Remarkable figures receive divine inspiration or prodigious natural talents and live deeply challenging and influential lives. In his “Axial Age” theory, Karl Jaspers notes that transformative individuals always seem to appear on the margins of empires/establishments – certainly the case with Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus. It should be noted that these kinds of figures often do not leave substantial writings behind them, or else when they do they are not grouped or ordered coherently – it is more likely to be a list of “sayings” than actual beliefs or ideas. At this stage the locus of authority is in the actual life of the Sage – his teachings, actions, and ideas.

Stage 2 – The Disciples Genius/Sages

leave the strongest legacy in the form of a group of “disciples” or followers/adherents. These groups either knew or were closely related to the individual in some way, and take direct influence from his/her life. Disciples usually produce significant written works about the Sage and his/her ideas, or else their own lives and interpretations of the Sage’s work become the subject of writings. The obvious example is the disciples of Jesus, but all three of our above cases had an extended group of disciples that were as interested in the lifestyle of their master as with what he had to say. The locus of authority has expanded now to be situated within a unified group of beliefs adhered to by a distinctive social group, but is still rooted in grounded in the personality of the Sage.

Stage 3 – The Commentators

The Commentators are separated from the Disciples by a generation – they did not know the Sage, but they may have known some of the disciples. Their writings are primarily exegetical in that they explain and apply the writings/teachings of the Sage and his/her disciples. In Christianity this type exegesis was occurring at the very earliest stages (Origen is traditionally named the first New Testament exegete). A huge majority of Greek philosophical schools developed out of the exegesis of Plato’s dialogues. The locus of authority here is increasingly less the life of the person and more his teachings and the ideals his life represented. The remarkable care and attention to detail of commentators on these texts show here that the texts hold authority rather than individuals or groups. Stage 4 – The Systematizers Systematizers primarily turn exegetical works into coherent systems of thought. In Greek philosophy Neoplatonism is a paradigm case, seen in Plotinus. Aquinas is the pinnacle of the Christian systematizer. It is worth noting that at this stage there tends to be a distance from the close readings characterized by the commentators as interpretative liberties are taken with texts to serve the coherence and beauty of a system of thought. In this way authority turns on the position of an idea or principle in its coherence with the system of doctrine.

Stage 5 – The Scholastics

Once a system of thought has been fully fleshed out, commonly schools form that seek to propagate their ideas. With a neat, ordered set of doctrine it is easy to create curricula that can harness the power of the system to expand and clarify a school of thought. The development of Scholasticism was a crucial stage in the history of Christian thought. The founding of the Jesuit order is a later historical example of Scholasticism. At this stage the locus of authority tends to be strongly within the tradition of interpretation. As the influence of a particular “orthodoxy” tends to grow exponentially with the onset of this stage, so does the “heresy” of emerging distinctive groups within the movement. Adherence to tradition, i.e. closeness to the teaching of the particular school becomes the yardstick for the acceptance or rejection of individuals and groups within the school of thought.

Stage 6 – The Politicians

Teaching institutions mean that ideas can be spread quickly and powerfully, and during the above stage rapid growth will probably occur. Because a school necessitates structure, teaching groups gain public and political visibility and often a measure of status and power. As above, the foundation of the Society of Jesus preceded its move into the political arena, as this organisation developed institutional structure and state involvement. By this stage the locus of authority may have moved towards membership or association with the institution representing the school of thought.

Stage 7 – The Reform

Amongst other factors, by the time a school of thought becomes established as a teaching authority and has institutional clout, there will be emerging significant opposition within the borders of the movement that claim they have lost the “original” or “authentic” ideas, way of life, etc of the Sage that founded them, and that there needs to be an emancipation from the corrupting chains of tradition, authority etc back to the kernel of truth that the Sage himself/herself had hold of. This happened in the Reformation, but it is also happening amongst “Emergent Church” type Christians who see established conservative Protestant religion (often with the label “Calvinism”) in a similar though less extreme way to which Luther saw the Roman Catholic Church. In this way I can see a dialectic or repeated pattern emerging, in which reform movements end up repeating the cycle with which they have themselves become disenchanted in the final stages of.

Here is then the progressive movement of the locus of authority through the stages detailed above

Individuals – Groups – Texts – Systems – Traditions – Institutions – (State) – Reform

Strength and Courage – 6 Principles for Spiritual Warfare from the Book of Joshua

Here are a few of my observations on some bits of the book of Joshua and possible applications of the account of Israel’s adventures in the Promised Land to our lives. By spiritual warfare here I mean not just magic words and shouting when you pray (what I used to think it was…), but any and every struggle you face in your life, from the most mundane to the most significant. If you’re struggling with anything, chances are it’s a spiritual struggle, and therefore its war!

1)      The Battle Belongs to the Lord

Joshua 6. First and foremost the fight you are in is not your fight but God’s. This truth liberates us from our need to overcome and win because God already has. His generous strength overcomes our needy weakness. In Joshua we never hear about who had the sharpest swords, the best training or the most ingenious tactics. We only ever hear about the spiritual realities that lay behind the blood and sweat of the battlefield – and it is in that realm that the battle is won or lost.

2)      The Lord is with You

Joshua 1:1-9. The deepest wells of strength come from the knowledge of God’s presence with us and in us. Three times the Lord commands Joshua to take strength and courage, and three times also he tells him that He himself will go with him in the fight. Just as Moses acknowledged the presence of the Lord to be a necessary condition of success and recognition as the people of God in a foreign land, so Joshua sees that all of his strength and courage is to be found in the Lord.

3)      Jesus is the Captain

Joshua 5:13-15. The commander of the Lord’s army is the messenger of the Lord, considered by many here to be the pre-incarnate Christ. He redefines the contours, conditions and strategies of every battle. His answer to the common military challenge Joshua gives here – “Friend or foe” is “Neither”. Just as the battle itself belongs to the Lord, so too does the command of his army. All authority is to be surrendered to him and all battles are fought under his duress and on his terms.

4)      Your purity matters

Joshua 7. The Sin of Achan broke Joshua’s heart; the man of strength and courage was now on his face before the Lord. But God responds quickly and practically to Joshua’s repentance on behalf of his army’s failure. It is clear that the defeat of the Israelites at Ai was directly caused by their transgression. Both this and the thorough and absolute way in which the impurity is purged from the people show the importance of holiness and purity for effectiveness in the battle. We must be consecrated, lest our hearts melt like water in the heat of battle.

5)      The Victory is, and must be, absolute.

Joshua 13:1-7. The Israelites had conquered whole realms of enemy territory, overcome the odds and triumphed over all the kings and rulers they had encountered. But here we see the importance of absolute victory. The Lord’s prophecy concerning his people’s possession of the Promised Land was not something to be treated with a “That’ll do” attitude. Christ says in the hour of his death “It is finished” – the victory of the cross was absolute. In the same way, the victorious Christ in us by his Spirit means that we should expect to win absolutely in every situation. We need a new definition of success.

6)      Create markers for the remembrance of breakthrough.

Joshua 4:1-10. Physical markers in remembrance of great victories and personal breakthroughs are seen throughout scripture. Jacob builds an altar on the morning after his identity is redefined by God. In the same way when the Israelites step into a new era in their identity, finally free from the reproach of Egypt, the spiritual wandering, and the pain of waiting they become for the first time an overcoming people, a people of victory; the memorial stones as they cross the Jordan are a testimony to their victory and to the importance of remembrance. Maybe don’t build an altar in your back garden… but think of ways you can mark the occasions of victory in your life.

The Prodigal

 A poem I wrote based on Luke 15:11-32.

The Prodigal

I finger this ring, alone now;

Sitting late at the casement,

Watching beneath a lingering word

Between Father and Son.

 

Vision in its dim shining glimmer

Of shame and bitter joy

Lost now in these moments

After a loud evening’s bewilderment.

 

Offended by his grace, I take

My pen to paper, seeking to rake

Some late and feeble corollary

To a gesture failed by words, then

 

I pause; He has hurled my precious No

Into a great and spectacular Yes, while

Rolling home through filthy paths

I had longed for the day of his wrath.

 

It hits me squarely, what it meant,

As my brother turns to go: It

Was in the pain of his releasing that

Lay the seed of his embracing.

 

What is this love, but in an instant

Great loss, and unfathomable gain?

Remember – “You were once lost…”