I ended my Salvo article about the Vatican’s synod by sharing some of the concerns that have been raised by emerging models of “gay-affirming” theology. I mentioned some arguments that are becoming all-too familiar: the sexual complementarity described in Genesis 2 doesn’t apply to the postlapsarian condition; the condemnations of homosexuality in Leviticus and Deuteronomy are part of the ceremonial law that was rescinded with Christ or part of the civil law that only applied to Israel; Romans 1:26-27 is not referencing long-term and stable homosexual partnerships; the inclusion of homosexuality in lists of sins in passages like 1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim. 1:9-10 refers only to pedophilia or lustful behaviors, etc.
What are we to make of these concerns? And why is there such confusion?
In this article I want to suggest that beyond the specific exegetical questions we must wrestle with in addressing these concerns, there is a larger meta-problem, which is that modern Christians have largely lost the ability to read the Bible properly and, consequently, end up being unable to understand scripture’s moral teaching on its own terms.
Historically, Christian moral teaching has been understood in the context of larger organizing structures which include,
- A coherent framework of Christian metaphysics
- Redemptive-historical narratives.
But what do I mean by this, and where/how/ why did we go wrong?
Where We Went Wrong and Why it Matters
In his seminal work After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre showed that it was only after the Enlightenment that ethics and morality came to be perceived as something detached from teleology, and therefore separable from the questions of human flourishing that had been central to all previous accounts of the virtues. This separation of virtue from teleology led to a number of difficulties in the 18th century, including the classic is-ought problem made famous by David Hume: how do you infer normative claims from purely empirical observations? In MacIntyre’s reading, what emerged from these shifts was “morality” coming to exist as its own domain, suspended in a nether realm that is neither theological, legal, aesthetic, nor phenomenological, but occupying a cultural space entirely its own but with a rather hazy ontological status. By thus detaching morality from the rest of life, many philosophers of the 18th century created space for interminable questions about whether morality is even real (or, as the problem is often framed, whether morality is “objective”).
Beyond questions about the objectivity of morality, the philosophical sea-change of the Enlightenment bequeathed a legacy in which there ceases to be a rational context in which to situate the virtues. Consequently, we live in what MacIntyre described as a post-virtue condition. By this he did not mean what so many conservative critics—particularly those of the baby boomer generation—so often diagnose as the problem, namely a breakdown in moral absolutes and the rise of relativism. On the contrary, moral absolutes are not only alive and well, but are actually on the ascendency with the emerging order known as Wokeism, the successor ideology of liberal secularism. Rather, what MacIntyre meant by a post-virtue society is that the virtues or pseudo-virtues to which we might appeal in public and private discourse (whether tolerance, justice, cooperation, equity, etc.) exist in a merely fragmentary form, the remnants of an older tradition that once provided a coherence now absent. At the risk of simplifying MacIntyre’s thesis, what gave coherence to this older tradition was that ethics were organically connected to teleology, and thus to considerations of human flourishing.
One might think that Christians would hold the fort against the ghettoized, non-teleological approach to ethics diagnosed by MacIntyre, but this has not been the case. As I pointed out in chapter 16 of Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, within larger cultural debates the grip our nation, we see the Christian political right shrinking from appeals to either natural reason or the common good, as if we can only defend God’s will for human communities on fideistic grounds, or on appeals to purely positive law (i.e., the Constitution and its original intent) or mere power and numbers (i.e., appeals to “moral majority” or the common opinion of “decent folks”). What gets entirely overlooked is the existence of an intelligible cosmic order that we can apprehend through objective knowing and to which we can appeal when establishing what is fitting for individuals and communities. When this intelligible cosmic order is lost—when, for example, even many Christians no longer perceive a rightly ordered nature that stands antecedent to, and the reason for, the commands that comprise our ethical obligations—then the raw will of God becomes the only mechanism left for asserting meaning, independent of teleological considerations of human flourishing. In such a case, we simply need to know what the rules are and to keep them, both in our capacity as individuals and in how we order our communities. As such, the Christian perspective on culture amounts to little more than colonizing isolated issues, which are then assessed in terms of a divine will that has already been partitioned off from larger questions of teleological purpose and ontological meaning. With this failure to recognize an inner logic within the world and human nature, Christian spokespersons become unable to point to the normativity of moral order, or the fittingness of God’s commands, within any context antecedent to mere will.
The result is that Christian contributions to the public discourse become largely unintelligible to those in different ideological communities, and even to the next generation. When the children of believers are given rules, or even virtues, these are often situated merely in terms of law, authority, and obedience, instead of a larger economy of purpose that makes virtue meaningful and coherent.
David Schindler points out that much of America’s “culture wars” hinge precisely on this view of nature as spiritually passive in its primary condition. That is to say, in Schindler’s reading of the current situation, both the Christian right and the secular left see the relation between religion and culture as an artificial connection imposed from outside, rather than a relation emerging organically out of the bedrock structure of reality itself. Whether that relation is conceived in terms of a God who is separate from the world intervening with arbitrary moral commands, or whether it is conceived as Christians trying to impose faith-generated norms into the public space, in both cases the relation between God and the world remains disconsonant, nonrational, and in some sense artificial. The disagreement that constitutes the so-called “culture wars” is simply whether such a relation is good or bad. What is almost entirely overlooked is the way both polarities hinge on what Schindler identifies as “a secularity that has been given its original meaning in abstraction from God [and which] already and in principle conceives any relation to God as an arbitrary addition to itself.” In such a scheme, the Christian must approach the world through the lens of numerous dualisms, including grace versus nature, will versus intelligence, sovereignty versus freedom, and the God of natural reason versus the Trinitarian God of faith. Schindler continued:
However significant their differences in assessing our current cultural situation—and these differences are significant—religionists and secularists alike begin by accepting, albeit from different directions and however tacitly and unwittingly, the separation, or extrinsic relation, between God and the saeculum—the world or cosmos—that is a hallmark of American religion’s (Protestant and Catholic) original, and dominant, self-understanding.
To counteract this subtle secularization of our faith, it is crucial to recover the narratives that situate Christian morality within a larger economy of teleology, including organizing structures from theological metaphysics and redemptive-historical readings. Without these larger structures of thought, even if we believe in Christian morality, we cannot be said to actually have a Christian worldview, for at best our affirmation of Christian ethics will merely be layered on top of an approach to life colonized by latent secular assumptions. We even see this tendency in the way the term “worldview” is frequently employed within popular apologetics discourse as a mere proxy for correct doctrinal and moral ideas but detached from the larger stories that give coherence to sexual ethics.
It is not surprising to find gay-affirming interpreters of the Bible showing complete amnesia about these larger structures in which Christian morality has historically been situated. Their method usually involves putting the language of isolated passages under the microscope to ascertain what range of meanings the language of this or that verse might plausibly cover (or more specifically, not cover). In so doing, their strategy is often not even to show that scripture is compatible with same-sex relationships (hereafter SSR), but merely to create enough confusion that one can credibly claim, “it isn’t clear,” and “there is a debate about this.” Once the scriptural data has been construed as debatable, then the issue of SSR can be settled on the basis of extra-biblical criteria.
But while it may be unsurprising to see the Christian left neglecting the broader structures of our faith, given the extreme cultural pressure to normalize SSR, the real tragedy is that many conservative Christians who would be willing to put their jobs on the line to defend the gender binary or traditional marriage, do so from the standpoint of the same theological amnesia. The catastrophe here is not primarily that this results in actual mistakes about Christian teaching (although it does – as we shall see later in this piece), but that the larger motifs that organize much of believers’ thinking become essentially secular, with Christian morality functioning as an add-on. This results in a code of ethics detached from considerations of teleology, flourishing, freedom, anthropology, and ontology, with Christians caught in the pincer movement of utilitarianism vs. a type of baptized Kantianism. Consequently, Christian ethics comes to be exceedingly fragile, because disconnected from the larger metaphysical and redemptive-historical architectures of our faith. Thus, it is hardly surprising to find so many Christians making a complete about-face as soon as a family member “comes out gay” or announces a gender switch. The problem is that even before the individual decided to “come out,” the family members did not actually hold to a Christian view of the world.
So what are these larger structures that organize a Christian view of reality and give context to Christian ethics? Let’s start with the metaphysical framework.
Same-Sex Relationships and Theological Metaphysics
Throughout the centuries, as Christian theologians have reflected on scripture, they have left us with a rich vocabulary for understanding concepts like sin, virtue, freedom, and the difference between ordered and disordered love. Throughout the last five years I have worked with a number of Christian philosophers and clergy to synthesize this tradition in the following eleven propositions.
- What is truly True and really Real is God himself, and all other things are true or real insofar as they participate in God, the ground of Being itself. (To understand what the tradition means when it says God is the ground of being itself, visit my earlier article on the subject.)
- God created a world that reflects and shares His own infinite Goodness, Truth and Beauty.
- Creatures, with their various natures and characteristics, reflect different aspects of God Himself, and thus become more true, real, and free as they live according to the perfection of their nature.
- Each creature’s purpose (end/telos) is determined by the type of thing God created it to be, as an expression of Himself, and for Himself.
- The nature, characteristics, and telos of each creature determines what is fitting for it, and this nature is expressed and reflected bodily. (This does not mean one can always deduce a creature’s nature and telos from biology alone, a point we will discuss shortly.)
- Man has a unique telos in creation that includes the following:a). Man is tasked with being a mediator between the visible and invisible, the material and the spiritual, and ultimately to serve as a mediator-priest between God and the rest of creation. This is reflected in man’s own dual nature: the rational, spiritual, and heavenly united with the sensible, bodily, and earthly.b). While all creation is oriented toward God, man has an intrinsic ordination towards the transcendental attributes of being (unity, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty). This ordination leads to desires that can only be satisfied in union with infinite Goodness, Truth and Beauty—in short, beatific communion with God, the Plentitude of all Being.c). The telos of mankind is fully revealed in Jesus Christ, the true Man, who perfectly unites God and humanity.
- Because the created world expresses God’s infinite Being, Goodness, and Beauty, the things of this world have genuine being, goodness, and beauty, albeit in a lower and finite degree.
- Given #7, certain things of this world are truly good in and of themselves, and thus fitting for our nature, while still not being the final Good. When received properly, these proximate goods kindle in us a desire for the ultimate Good, and are a way of sharing in Divine Goodness, and thus fulfilling our purpose.
- In the postlapsarian condition, the human body, brain, soul, and spirit ceased being fully integrated, leading toa) the temptation to place lower goods above the higher ones (especially the infinite/final/ultimate Good).
b) the temptation to treat finite proximate goods as final ends, rather than to move through them to the ultimate Good in which they participate;
c) the temptation to treat as good those traits or behaviors that misfit our nature and which are thus not ontologically and teleologically normative;
d) various conditions of dysteleology: physical and mental states that deviate from what is ontologically and teleologically normative for the types of creatures we are. - Through virtue, theosis, and the sacramental life, we are able to become realigned with the primordial telos of our nature, and thus become more true, real, and free, and ultimately fulfill our beatific vocation.
- Scripture and the church show us how to achieve #10, while reason and general revelation can show the fittingness of Christian teaching (including morality) but not its necessity.
Where did these propositions come from? Over hundreds of years, these propositions were reflected in prayers, spiritual literature, paintings, liturgy, and mystagogy, in addition to being found in scripture. These metaphysics form part of the background understanding for how almost all Christians (east and west) understood reality until comparatively recently. Even when the elements of this structure have not been explicitly spelled out in propositional form, these truths have been part of the background understanding, or “social imaginary,” for how Christians perceived the world.
The last two propositions, by linking virtue with special revelation, approach what we may describe as the rules of Christian morality. However, the genius of classical Christian metaphysics has been to situate these rules within a larger framework of human flourishing and reflection on the Good, as represented by Propositions 1-8. Without understanding the Ultimate Good, we can have no coherent notion of my good or the goods to which my life should be ordered. Yet putting it in these terms can be misleading if one imagines that the agent, upon entering the world, must achieve an abstract notion of the Good before Christian morality makes sense or can be legitimately compelling. What actually happens is more the other way around: the rules we encounter as children or catechumens (through teaching as well as through stories, liturgy, and cultural norms) educate us on the normative structures of reality, and the teleological perfection appropriate to us as creatures—in short, the Good. Rules, both at the moral and cultural level, embody and institutionalize a certain notion of human flourishing, and thus a substantive vision of the Good. That is why a child who is deprived of rules, discipline and proper habitus is unable to understand why he exists, and toward Whom his life is ordered. There is thus reciprocity between obedience to good rules and knowledge of the Good. MacIntyre discussed these reciprocities in his 1989 inaugural lecture, noting that “insofar as anyone lacks knowledge of his or her true good, such a person is also deprived of the only sound reasons for right action.” Yet equally, MacIntyre notes
Each of us learns how to articulate his or her own initial inner capacity for comprehending what the good is in the course of also learning from others about rules and about virtues, so that, through a dialectical process of questioning the ways in which rules, virtues, goods and the good are interrelated, we gradually come to understand the unity of the deductive structures of practical reasoning.
We can call the deductive structures of practical reason, like the eleven propositions above, ”natural law” if we want, provided we understand that natural law is not a tool for proving the truth of Christian morality in full. Indeed, as an apologetic mechanism, natural law tends to be very underwhelming. Cicero had natural law, yet this hardly provided him with the entire package of Christian morality. Drawing on biology, natural law might be able to show that there is sexual complementarity between men and women, but not that monogamy is normative for homosapiens. Similarly, using natural law one can show that humans have an innate drive to preserve social harmony through conflict resolution, but not which methods of conflict resolution are morally normative. Hence, the recognition in Proposition #5 that one cannot always deduce a creature’s nature and telos from biology alone, and the inclusion of Proposition #11, which summarizes the Thomistic insight that reason can show the fittingness of Christian morality but not its necessity. For natural law to have any coherence, general revelation and special revelation must work in tandem, instead of being approached as non-overlapping magisteria. While acknowledging these qualifications, we can—and indeed must—recognize a missional imperative for positioning natural law as central in the SSR debate. The real missional value of natural law is that it helps us articulate the commands of scripture within a larger economy of human flourishing, and thus avoid the fragility of a Christian ethic constituted on the lines of voluntarism or divine-command theory.
This is an important point to make since many modern individuals who have not been educated in the church’s rich tradition of metaphysics instinctively “hear” the prohibitions against SSR as arbitrary stipulations of divine fiat, or something one must affirm on purely fideistic grounds, or perhaps equivalent to saying, “therefore my gay son is going to hell.” But classical Christian metaphysics, as summarized in the eleven propositions above, situates moral sin within the attenuation of flourishing and diminution of true freedom. As such, this metaphysical framework can help us understand that if SSR are sinful, then such behaviors misfit our true nature as images of God, and are part of the cluster of behaviors that deviate us away from what is normative, thus limiting our ability to fulfill the beatific vocation.
Of course, this could be said of any sin, but it is still worth emphasizing in a discussion of SSR since gay-affirming interpretations of the Bible tend to neglect these larger concerns. To give an example, if same-sex marriage is ethically licit, then we should be able to show how these relationships reflect and share God’s goodness (prop #2), how they help us to become more free (prop #3), how these relationships can assist in the vocation to mediate heaven and earth (#6a) and grow towards theosis (#10), etc. Throughout the centuries, Christian philosophers have spent much time reflecting on how marriage does just this, and how the man-woman union integrates with the broader structures of theological metaphysics (I actually devote an entire chapter to this in my recent book), yet the gay-affirming literature proceeds as if this larger discourse can be ignored. By itself this does not prove that the revisionist approaches are false, but I think it is significant to see what the gay-affirming movement leaves behind as much as what it adds. Despite their claim to be merely expanding the Christian concept of marriage, they seem to actually be involved in a process of subtraction and reduction.
To give another example, proposition #10 emphasizes that the sacramental life is central to experiencing true freedom and growing in theosis. The church has a robust literature reflecting on how traditional marriage fulfills this—for example, through marriage having a sacramental quality that empowers us to fulfill our primordial vocation (see Matthew Levering’s Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage: Human Marriage as the Image and Sacrament of the Marriage of God and Creation)
But if SSR are morally licit, then are homosexual relationships also bearers of sacramentality? If so, does that mean that the real theological significance of marriage must be limited to that which traditional marriage and SSR have in common (such as bonding) and not those aspects unique to the former? If the answer is yes, does this then entail a restructuring of the theology of marriage – a total paradigm shift?
To understand the significance of this last question, it may be helpful to reflect on a curious series of events that happened in the field of jurisprudence on the eve of SSM being legalized in England and Wales. Initially, everyone assumed that the new provisions would be merely quantitative (opening marriage up to more people) rather than qualitative (changing the nature of marriage in society). But then, at the eleventh hour, legal scholars realized that implementing SSM would actually require the overhaul of thousands of other laws that relate to the role of marriage in society? Why? Because many concepts rooted in years of common law and enshrined in hundreds of pages of diverse legislation (e.g. concepts like the mechanics of what constitutes consummation and adultery, and the societal and legal significance thereof, etc.) would now have to be rethought according to the broader definition of marriage. The Prime Minister’s government acknowledged that if gender differentiation is no longer essential to the married state, then the concept of non-consummation specifically would have to be redefined throughout England and Wales, not to mention many other aspects of marriage. Therefore, Parliament issued an instruction to the courts to figure out over time “a definition as to what constitutes same-sex consummation and same-sex adultery,” with the assumption that the new definition would then apply back to heterosexual couples, thus requiring the overhaul of legislation in which the older understandings had been sedimented.
The legal problem Parliament faced was paradigmatic of a larger dilemma confronting all the nations that legalized SSM. What at first seemed to be merely a change in who could get married, ended up implicating a whole new understanding of marriage itself and its role in society. Douglas Farrow traced this happening in real time within Canada, though the dilemma now impacts the entire secular west.
A similar problem now faces denominations throughout America who are considering updating their policies to allow for SSR. Just as England, Wales, and Canada found that SSM required a qualitative—and unanticipated—adjustment in how we understand the institution of marriage and its role in society, will we also see that denominations accepting of SSR will need to revamp theological metaphysics and/or theology of marriage—perhaps even fundamentals of anthropology—in ways not currently anticipated?
The idea of churches accepting SSM is comparatively new, so perhaps it is unfair for me to criticize the gay theology movement for not wrestling with these questions and for not making an attempt to integrate their agenda with the broader architecture of theological metaphysics. After all, one might plausibly argue, it will take years of reflection to integrate SSR into traditional metaphysics. But surely we should ask at the outset if such integration is even possible. One could argue that this was the mistake made by denominations that ordained women – they never really explored (until the genie was already out of the bottle) whether having female priests would totally change the theology of the pastoral office and the doctrine of ordination. It took a while for theology to catch up with practice, but eventually we witnessed a complete unraveling of the theology of the pastoral office within the mainline denominations. Looking back, we can see that when the Episcopal church was debating women’s ordination, they might have actually benefited from debating the theology of ordination itself.
If we are to learn anything from this history, we might now want to ask not simply whether the language of this or that verse is compatible with SSR, but questions such as:
- what is the larger theology of marriage in scripture?
- what are the theological metaphysics in which that theology is situated?
- can the church even adopt SSM without needing to completely revamp the larger structures of theological metaphysics that have, until now, contextualized Christian ethics in general, and Christian marital theology in particular?
These questions push us to look more specifically at the Christian theology of marriage, and thus the redemptive-historical understanding of salvation history.
Genesis and Gender in the Redemptive-Historical Narrative
Redemptive-historical approaches to scripture serve a similar function as theological metaphysics in situating Christian ethics within a broader story of flourishing. Redemptive-historical approaches to scripture (often referred to in academic theology as “biblical theology”) can be distinguished from—though complementary with—other types of theology such as systematic theology, exegetical theology, patristics, dogmatics, etc. As a discipline within academic theology, redemptive-historical readings of scripture explore the progressive nature of God’s unfolding plan in time and space. The domain deals with questions such as the progression from creation to new creation, or how Christ’s kingdom develops in stages, such as inauguration, continuation, and culmination.
Redemptive-historical approaches help recover allegorical and symbolic thinking insofar as they can highlight how certain overarching patterns and types (the tree of life motif, the exile/exodus/return pattern, the clean/unclean theme, etc.) collect greater resonance as the biblical narrative unfolds in time. Redemptive-historical approaches are also helping in pushing back against the tendency to treat the Bible as simply a collection of spiritual insights rather than a story working toward a climax within the world of space and time.
Redemptive-historical approaches to scripture, like theological metaphysics, also serve as an important buffer against the tendency to see the Bible as isolated moral commands disconnected from larger questions of teleology and ontology. Rather puzzlingly, however, training in redemptive-historical readings of scripture does not tend to be a priority in contemporary catechesis; consequently, even when we come to passages like Romans 1, in which the apostle is himself doing theology in a redemptive-historical mode, we tend automatically to “hear” it as mere do’s and don’ts, isolated from the larger teleological context of the redemptive-historical flow. Such a reductionist approach opens Paul’s condemnation of SSR in Romans 1:24-26 up to various gay-affirming rationalizations, the most common being that he was merely condemning the only type of SSR he knew about, namely non-monogamous unions. From a historical perspective, this is complete bosh: it is clear that long-term stable homosexual relationships between peers did exist in the Greco-Roman world, as Plato’s Symposium and various accounts of the Roman empire show. But such problems, while important to wrestle with, only emerge from the vacuum created from the turn away from the redemptive-historical approach that is central to the Pauline narrative.
I’ll return to Romans 1 later in this article. However, the proper starting point for all redemptive-historical readings, including Paul’s, is the story of creation in Genesis.
Genesis, no less than Paul’s epistle to the Romans, has to be understood in its original context, namely the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) culture of the Bronze Age. The Creation of the world that Genesis describes happened many thousands of years prior to the ancient Near Eastern culture of the Bronze Age; yet insofar as the Genesis text is the product of the ANE (which is to say, that is when it was written, though it drew on oral sources from an earlier time), we must attend to that culture to discover the context to the text. A similar example to this approach is the way we interpret Sir Thomas Malory’s (1415–1471) book Le Morte d’Arthur. This classic book about the legends of King Arthur reflects the traditions of fifteenth-century chivalry, even though the historical King Arthur lived many centuries earlier; thus, Malory’s own period provides the context for understanding and interpreting Malory’s work. Or again, we must interpret Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar within the literary context of Elizabethan England, not the period of classical antiquity when Julius Caesar lived. (For a further discussion of historical context as it relates to authorial intent, see my article “Modern Biblical Studies Meets Eastern Orthodoxy: A Personal Defense of Historical Scholarship.”) Similarly, the context for the Genesis Creation account is the period in which it was actually written/collected (drawing on earlier oral sources, to be sure), namely during the Bronze Age when Moses and his predecessors were asserting Yahweh’s dominion over the gods of the surrounding nations. (And yes, I know the canonical text didn’t reach final form until much later still, as evidenced by the presence of Hebrew words that did not exist in the Bronze Age). But even putting it in these terms can be misleading, as if Genesis is merely an adaptation of Babylonian, Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite sources. On the contrary, one of the reasons the ANE can provide such fruitful context for Genesis in the first place is because these cultures retained a memory, though corrupted, of primordial truth stretching back to the very creation of the world. Where ANE ideas distorted the truth about creation, Genesis challenges; yet one cannot understand that challenge without knowing something about the broader milieu, just as one cannot understand how Shakespeare radically challenged and departed from dramatic conventions of his day without first knowing something about Elizabethan theater.
Here’s why this is relevant in the present discussion: the historiographical evidence is now clear that within the ANE cultural context of Genesis, archetypal understandings of gender were suffused symbolically throughout the religious and geopolitical structures (keeping in mind that, at the time, there was no distinction between religion and politics). The Genesis text functions against the backdrop of this larger tapestry. While Genesis rejects much of the anthropology of the ANE, including dominant understandings about the subhuman status of women, the text does not overhaul the archetypal understanding of gender prevalent in the ANE, but rather subverts it through the doctrine of the imago dei.
But what do I mean by an archetypal framework of gender? In the ANE, the gendered polarities of masculine and feminine were perceived as patterns and principles larger than men and women at the mere biological level, while these patterns and principles were often understood as having a cosmological and cosmogonical dimension. Biological sex differences participated in, and derived meaning from, these larger archetypal patterns of male-ness and female-ness.
The male archetype was associated with the act of creating. “Reality itself or aspects of the natural world,” writes Stephanie Lynn Budin in her 2023 publication Gender in the Ancient Near East, “are brought into existence by the (phallic) actions of the god.” Within the ANE mythologies, “this creativity is expressed in phallic and fluid-based imagery, whereby male orgasm brings forth a fluid that either engenders reality in toto or fertilizes a pre-existing world.”
In the case of fertilizing a pre-existing world, the action of a creator god gives not just life but meaning to the world that results. Significantly, this meaning-giving is an act of creation, for as I point out in my book Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, “We tend to think of Creation as juxtaposed against nonexistence; thus, we suppose that the opposite of being is nonbeing, [but]…in the ANE context, to give meaning to a thing is, in some sense, to bring it into being.” In this case, the meaning-making creativity of the heavenly masculine, is met with the nurturing fecundity of the earthly feminine, which embodies the masculine seed, resulting in life and order.
These gendered archetypes offered a normative structure for assessing if a human person was living up to their gender; someone was a real man or a real woman to the degree that they participated in the larger archetypal pattern appropriate to their particular sex. This can even be seen at the level of linguistics, in both the Sumerian and Akkadian words for the “state of being a woman” or “state of being a man,” as Stephanie Lynn Budin explains.
In Summerian, these [the “state of being a woman” or “state of being a man,”] are nam.manus and nam.nitah; in Akkadian, they are sinnisutu(m) and zikrutu(m). Sumerian nam refers to a state of being or fate; the Akkadian suffix –utu refers to a state of being or -ness quality. Thus, femaleness or the state of being male.
The concept of gender (as opposed to sex) also comes across especially well in reference to being a “real” man or a “real” woman in the literature. Such references rarely apply to the object’s anatomy (e.g. you are not a “real” man because you do not have a beard) but because of the object’s behavior. Thus, to return to our Sumerians, a series of “insult” dialogues in both the emegir (standard) and emesal (“women’s”) dialects of Sumerian question the gender identity of the person being insulted.
These Sumerian insults are significant in that they suggest the gendered polarities of masculine and feminine represent a standard that a person can conform to well or badly, based on the person’s behavior. But the principles of masculinity and femininity were not merely associated with behavioral patterns. One of the most interesting aspects of these archetypes, which will become relevant when we circle back to Genesis, is what we already touched on briefly above, namely that masculinity was associated with the generation of new life, unlike in later history where the feminine came to be associated with the life-source. As Ann Macy Roth explains in A Companion to the Ancient Near East,
The male role in sexual reproduction was seen as the actual creation of new life, which was then implanted in the female… They nourished the life that his creative power produced…. This idea of the man as the life-source is reflected in the Hittite saying, “To the man virility and potency / To the woman femininity and motherhood.
This particular polarity is especially clear in Mesopotamian myths: Budin, in her study already cited, explains how these myths show that “male seed/semen gave the ‘spark’ of new life, but the female body was needed to mold that seed into a human being” and show “the division of male as engenderer and female as bearer and nourisher.” Budein continues:
In general, then, reproductive fertility required both sexes. The roles were fixed: Males provided the fluid seed of life; females incubated, molded, and ultimately nourished that new life. But the masculine element was considered dominant in this process of creation: It was the male who created new life, which he then “gave” to the female.”
We will return to these gendered archetypes later in this article, but there is another crucial aspect of ANE culture that needs to be understood before we have the pieces in place for understanding Genesis, namely temples.
ANE religions did not focus on humans going to heaven, but on heaven coming to earth. But what is heaven? Heaven is the realm in the sky where the gods dwell; it represents the true form or pattern for which earth is an imperfect perfection. Think a reified version of Plato. The goal of “religion” was to enact that cosmic reality on earth, to make what is true in heaven be true on earth. But what is true in heaven? Well, your nation’s god rules in the heavens above the gods of the other nations; hence, making that true on earth involves conquering the other nations—chopping off the limbs of your adversaries, enslaving their children, raping their women, all the normal ANE brutality.
As heaven was considered sacred space, enacting the “as in heaven so on earth” reality involved creating a site of sacred space on earth, namely a temple. The temples would be a place your god could fill with his presence, an absolute precondition for connecting earth and heaven and thus achieving prosperity as a people. The temple was an earthly pattern of the cosmic temple. As John Walton explained in Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament,
“Since the temple on earth was considered only a type of the larger, archetypal cosmic temple, many images and symbols evoke the relationship between temple and cosmos. The temple is considered the center of the cosmos, and in itself a microcosmos.”
Once enthroned in his temple, a nation’s god could take command, ultimately through the prophetic leadership of the god-king with whom he was associated. Through the leadership of the god-king, the dynamic of “as in heaven, so on earth,” could occur, with the establishment of a vertical nexus between heaven and earth. It is thus no surprise to find the ancients giving their temples names such as “Bond between Heaven and Earth,” the name given to the temple of Ishtar at Nippur.
When a nation built a temple, the construction process would often culminate in an initiation ceremony placing the god’s image inside, thus enabling the god to descend from heaven to dwell within that image, while the god also continuing to live and rule in the heavens. The commencement of this ceremony would involve opening the mouth and nose of the god’s image so he could come and inhabit it. Through such ceremonies, ancient people believed they could manipulate their god to meet their needs, so that his virility could be harnessed. The sacred space of the temple then functioned as the center for the god’s activity in enacting his will on the earth, leading to the elevation and glory of his favored nation, and resulting order and law. The god’s presence would flow from the temple throughout the world, and this is represented in the imagery of some ancient temples with rivers (a sign of divine life) flowing out of the temple. But to keep harnessing this order and to continue receiving divine favor, the people would need to constantly meet the needs of the god, usually through obedience and sacrifice (sometimes human sacrifice).
Gender symbolism entered into this religious framework at almost every level. Within ANE worship, those on earth played a feminine role of welcoming the initiative of the divine male (the god in heaven – the source of life), so that his indwelling within the sacred space of the temple, like the male entry into the sacred space of the womb, can result in new life. By making the earth habitable for the god, his people receive favor, protection, and glorification, in much the same way that a husband would protect and glorify his wife. And just as a wife tries to meet the needs of her husband so that he doesn’t get angry or desert her (remember this is Bronze Age and thus postlapsarian), so each tribe or nation tried to keep the good favor of their god by continually meeting his needs through such activities as prayers, bringing the firstfruits of the harvest to the temple, and sacrifice.
All this was politically significant within the ANE, given the belief that men could harness this dynamic and call down the gods as a way to manipulate the deity and thus assert power. This is the whole point of the tower of Babel. Within the southern Mesopotamian region where the events of Genesis 11 occurred, these towers played a central role in humans trying to control and manipulate their deities. These structures, known as ziggurat temples, were integral to the idolatrous rituals that invited gods to descend to earth so that humans could meet the god’s needs and, in turn, receive favor and thus achieve greatness and prevent disintegration. As such, Babel was not about men trying to reach God in heaven, as is popularly thought, but rather to call down god/heaven. C.S. Lewis gets this totally right in his description of a modern-day Babel, portrayed as the N.I.C.E., in That Hideous Strength.
Babel was an attempt to invite the male initiative and thus make themselves great like a wife becomes great when her husband beautifies her, glorifies her, and—via impregnation—enables her to actualize her life-giving potential. The fact that ziggurat temples often had gardens on the top underscores this pattern we see at Babel, because the fecundity of the feminine earth approximates the space of the womb, hospitable to the life-giving virility of the god offered in rain (ANE literature is replete with sexual symbolism attached to rain).
(Those wishing to study more about ziggurat gardens being symbolic of the fertility provided by the deity should consult K. Gleason’s entry “Gardens” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archeology in the Near East. Those wishing to understand the rationale for associating Babel with a ziggurat tower should consult John Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, pp. 120-21 or my own Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, p. 343-45.)
Just as gardens were understood in light of the womb, so women were understood in the light of gardens. As women nurtured and gave form to the life-force coming from outside, they participated in the larger pattern in which the earth nurtures and gives form to life coming above (via rain and sunshine). As Baruch Levine noted in her 2002 study, Sex and gender in the ancient Near East: proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationa c cm b b 6le, Helsinki, July 2-6, 2001, “the womb provides the same nutrients to the embryo as the mother earth does to vegetation that grows in it… The seed is provided by the male, and it grows inside the womb.” (p .341-342) Thus we find metaphors from gardening used in ancient Egyptian love poetry, in which women and goddesses ask for someone to stroke and plough their vulvae (obvious gardening metaphors) with no corresponding poems in which men ask for their genitalia to be stroked. Remember, according to ANE gender archetypes, the masculine initiative is associated with providing form, while the feminine is associated with receiving and embodying form, in order that this masculine-feminine synthesis can result in new life.
These basic patterns are not unique to the ANE but occur in myths across the world in the figure of the sky father and earth mother, sometimes also understood as the masculine sun and the feminine moon (the moon, though in the heavens, has been understood to have a special relationship to earthly females and their cycles).
Gender is part of the fundamental architecture of the cosmos and therefore is a fundamental part of its narrative structure as well.
The union of Heaven and Earth is both the beginning and end of creation; it is that by which and for which all things were made.
Salvation is… pic.twitter.com/bZQeIMG0JQ
— Annie Crawford (@annielcrawford) December 16, 2024
How does this all fit together in our understanding of Genesis? Modern scholars view gender in the ANE as hopelessly misogynist, and while there is legitimacy to that concern, I would like to suggest that their archetypal understanding of gender, though corrupted by sin, echoed a primordial pattern present from the very dawn of creation. That pattern, though laid out so clearly in Genesis, is largely lost on us because we are so far removed from the cultural milieu of the ANE. Yet, as would be clear to an ancient reader or hearer of the text, Genesis draws on and subverts the gender archetype in ways that are significant and humanizing, especially for women. Let’s look at key features of the text to explore this dual accommodation-confrontation.
To the original hearers of the Genesis story, the days of creation would have been understood as an initiation ceremony whereby a temple is constructed for the masculine God. The various places in scripture that associate Eden with a mountain clearly invoke the symbolism of a garden on top of a ziggurat. God is constructing the sacred space of Eden to be His temple, which is like a womb for Him to enter with His presence and life-giving virility. In keeping with ANE symbolism, the crowning moment of this ceremony was when God placed His image in the temple and then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life so man could become a living being. Remember that when pagan temples were complete, they would have a ceremony whereby the mouth and nose of the image would be opened, allowing the god to come and inhabit it. But in this case, it is God who opens the nostrils of man and breathes life into him, so he can function as His image. Instead of man building a temple and then bringing a god he had built into it to rule, God Himself builds a temple (Eden) and then puts His image (humankind) into it; rather than man opening the nose of his god’s image to activate divine presence, the true God opens the nose of his image (man), to bring his presence into the temple (Eden).
God’s images are then tasked with the vocation of making the rest of the earth habitable for His presence, so that life can extend from the Edenic womb throughout all of the world. We do this not merely through obeying the command to be fruitful and multiply, but in our priestly capacity of mediating earth and heaven, ultimately so that earth can become Edenic. This involves raising the beasts upward (for example, through loving stewardship that enables animals to achieve their telos) and bringing heaven downward (tending the earth so it is habitable for God’s presence).
This vocation to join the (feminine) earth with the (masculine) heaven is situated within the larger cosmic drama wherein the polarities of creation week (night and day, light and dark, dry land and sea, heavens and earth, waters above and waters below) come together while remaining distinct. These polarities, and the larger drama between sameness and difference, unity and diversity, is the cosmic architecture in which the masculine and the feminine (Adam and Eve) are situated, which then unfolds in the ongoing drama between meaning and matter, virility and fecundity, initiation and response, begetting and nurturing new life.
This primal pattern can also be described in vertical terms, as Matthew Pageau as shown in his commentary on Genesis. Genesis begins with God who is above us creating the world below, yet in order for God to unify Himself with creation, these two realities (one symbolically “up” and the other symbolically “down”) have to connect.
Without this up-down connection, the earth lacks meaning and is empty. We already saw that the creation account does not describe God creating a world out of complete non-existence (that, no doubt, also occurred, but it is not the emphasis of the Hebrew creation narrative); rather, the text describes a condition of the earth that is passive and without meaning, a watery expanse that is “without form and void,” (Gen 1:2) and a ground that is without life and order (2:5). God hovers over this watery expanse to bring life. The image is of an earth that is empty and lacking in meaning, mere potency waiting to be actualized. God’s creative act is to connect earth with heaven via embodying Himself with the materials on the earth: in short, creating a temple (the Garden of Eden) in which His images dwell, in order that creation might move toward Him in an ever-unfolding doxology of beatitude.
Following St. Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Maximos the Confessor, Dr. Timothy Patitsas describes this creative dynamic as follows in The Ethics of Beauty:
God was so good that his goodness could not be contained within himself. It poured forth “outside” himself in a cosmic Theophany over against the face of darkness. The appearing of this ultimate Beauty caused non-being to forget itself, to renounce itself, to leave behind its own ‘self’ (non-being), and come to be. All of creation is thus marked by this eros, by this movement of doxology, liturgy, and love. Creation is a movement of repentance out of chaos and into the light of existence.
Man’s vocation is to continue this creative work, in order to link heaven and earth—to make all of the world habitable for God’s presence. Remember that ancient temples were often called names like “Bond between heaven and earth.” The center of this bond between heaven and earth was the god’s image in the form of a stone idol. As the image stewards of God’s garden temple, mankind becomes the bond between heaven and earth. He does this through his priestly function of mediating on the vertical axis. With a physical body and rational soul, the human stands midway between the beasts (earth) and the angels (heaven), poised to bring God’s space above to the world below, and to raise the things of earth to heaven.
One of the ways mankind raises the things of earth to heaven is through shepherding the animals so they too can fulfill their proper telos. This occurs initially through naming the animals, though it is not difficult to imagine—as indeed C.S. Lewis does in Perelandra—further tasks that pre-fallen man and woman could have fulfilled in shepherding the beasts toward flourishing. Mankind’s relation to the beasts is to mirror what God’s relation is to mankind: as God raises mankind upward, mankind is empowered to raise the beasts humanward. Only in this way does mankind fulfill the function of being a bond and connecting point between the heavenly and the earthly.
In addition to raising the beasts upward, mankind was also tasked with spreading Eden out into the wilderness. Contrary to what you may have thought, the entire earth was not edenic. Most of the world was wilderness, waiting to be subdued. Space prohibits detailed discussion of this (again, see my book Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation) but suffice to say, just as God spoke into the primordial void to bring loving order, so mankind is tasked with spreading Eden outward via loving husbandry and the expansion of the human species. This expansion is both numerical (“be fruitful”) and geographical (“multiply”). This expansion through the earth on the horizontal axis is the means by which mankind activates the proper relation on the vertical axis: bringing heaven downward (nurturing the sacred space wherein God dwells on earth) and raising the beasts upward.
Within the divine economy, the numerical expansion involves marriage, even as it did within the pagan economy of ancient Mesopotamia. The corrupted version of this involved temple prostitution or even ritualized marriages between priests and priestesses, as when the goddess Inanna marries her husband Dumuzi in a yearly fertility rite, which entailed that “the high priestess of the city, acting in the capacity of the fertility goddess Inanna, would have sex with the high priest or the king role-playing the fertility god Dumuzi.” Yahweh also situates the masculine-feminine synthesis as central to the priestly vocation of intermediating earth and heaven, but in this case it occurs through holy matrimony, initially Adam and Eve who act as the prototype for all marriages to come. This masculine-feminine synthesis then becomes central to the priestly vocation of activating the heaven-earth synthesis.
This pattern opens up multiple layers of fractals, as the heaven-earth, masculine-feminine pattern unfolds in further layers through creation. For example, though humankind occupies a feminine position in relation to God, within humanity there is a division between male and female, wherein men are associated with continuing to exercise dominion as God did in the first half of creation week, while women continue the work God did on the latter half of the Creation week when He filled the world with life. As men and women fulfill their image-bearing vocation via numerical and geographical expansion, they participate in this heaven-earth symbolism, with the man representing heaven by speaking new life into a space without form and void—both the womb (leading to numerical expansion) and the wilderness (leading to geographical expansion)— and the woman representing the earth by receiving the man’s meaning-giving seed, embodying it, and nurturing it within herself. (When I say the man “represents” heaven and the woman “represents” the earth, the word “represent” can be misleading here, if one thinks of these connections as constituted in a merely nominal sense. But this representation occurs at the level of sacramentality, in which physical objects embody and participate in spiritual meaning and symbolism. God created a world in which sign and signified have a real, as opposed to a merely nominal, connection. For a discussion of the theology of sacramentality, see my book Gratitude in Life’s Trenches, p. 279-284 and Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation p. 297-300.)
While God’s intimate presence with humanity was lost following our first parents’ expulsion from Eden, He returned to His people through the giving of the law, and in the tabernacle and later the temple. In each of these cases, however, God’s return takes place within the symbolism of an earth-heaven marriage. Consider the law. When God touches the earth with rain, the fruit of that connection is the harvest. This was celebrated in the “Feast of Weeks” (Shavuot) or firstfruits (Exodus 23:16; Numbers 28:26). Also known as the feast of Pentecost because it occurred fifty days after Passover, it is traditionally associated with the giving of the law. The giving of the law occurred when God (represented as “up” in heaven/sky, approached through ascending a mountain) touches earth (the burning bush), with the fruit of that connection being the law, and thus the potential for a renewed humanity.
At the heart of this renewed humanity was God’s restored presence in the tabernacle and temple, a recapitulation of Eden when God walked and talked with man. The womb-like character of the Holy of Holies, together with the garden symbolism throughout the temple’s artwork, situate His returned presence within the same masculine-feminine polarity as Eden. Again the purpose is to unify heaven and earth, with a sacred space (the Holy of Holies) set apart for receiving God’s presence. Into the darkness of the Holy of Holies, like the empty darkness that preceded creation, God descends with His life-giving presence in order to create something new, just as the husband descends into the darkness of his wife’s womb to create new life. This “something new” is the outward expansion of God’s temple to heal the entire earth. Indeed, Genesis is clear that the intention of the Eden-temple was always that it would grow outward to cover the entire world and eliminate the wilderness, thus unifying heaven and earth; similarly, the law and the prophets are clear that the intention of the covenant with Abraham was always that the shekinah glory might extend out of the Holy of Holies to cover the whole world, thus unifying heaven and earth. As such, both Eden and the Temple function as a type of womb, pregnant with a life that expands outward in further layers of fractals.
These layers of symbols, and patterns within patterns, are difficult for modern readers to grasp because we are not used to thinking symbolically. But once you begin thinking like someone in the ANE, with their understanding (though corrupted) of gender archetypes, these patterns weave together into a beautiful tapestry. The male-female pattern is then seen as a larger outworking of the broader heaven-earth pattern at the heart of reality. Indeed, this masculine/feminine pattern, so primal to the ANE and the redemptive-historical narrative, is the larger archetype in which human sexuality and biology must be understood. As Annie Crawford explains in “Gender and the Cosmos: The Restoration of Worlds in C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy,”
To understand what a human is, we must understand what reality is. If the whole universe is merely molecules in motion with no intrinsic meaning or essential form, then man is also merely an instance of molecules in motion with no inherent meaning or essential form. But if the cosmos is a marriage of heaven and earth wherein all the molecules in motion are essentially formed by meaningful, spiritual patterns, then man is also a marriage of heaven and earth, a particular instance of matter filled with inherent meaning and possessing an essential form.
As Matthieu Pageau describes in The Language of Creation, the union of meaning and matter is the fundamental principle of cosmic order. This basic structure repeats at every level of being, and we can perceive creation “as a series of embedded re-presentations of its cosmic principles…. Each part of the universe can reflect a miniature version of the whole.” At the level of man as ‘human’, we are formed into the image of God through the union of spirit and body. As man multiplies and moves to the level of family, the pattern reiterates, with the masculine representing heavenly form and the feminine as earthly matter.
In relation to heaven and earth, men and women hold the same position as divine mediator, both made in the image of God and tasked with “lowering heavenly meaning” and “raising earthly matter.” While each individual human is made in the image of God, in relationship to one another at the level of family, men and women enact different cosmic roles. As Pageau explains, “Adam is the union of heaven and earth at the cosmic level, and … this union translates into a sexual union at the human level. Therefore the male and female sides each re-present one half of the equation.” Man represents the creative initiative of heaven and the woman symbolizes the earth which gives body and nourishment to the heavenly form. Man represents the meaning and cover of heaven while woman represents the embodiment and nourishment of earth. In sexual union, the masculine seed of meaning is received and nourished by the feminine body and this union gives rise to a new microcosm, a new sacred representation of the image of God.
In the Genesis account, man was created first because the masculine gender analogically reflects the Creator of all things. God exists prior to creation which means that in the cosmic structure, meaning exists prior to its reception in matter. Therefore, within the microcosm of sex, the man exists prior to the woman. The very words man and woman express this generative and temporal ordering — the word woman is formed from the root word man as the woman was taken out of the man, flesh of his flesh (this is as true in Hebrew as it is in English)….Gender is not a projection of or an abstraction from biological sex; it is a transcendent, spiritual reality that is manifested in distinct ways within male and female creatures.
Crawford goes on to cite C.S. Lewis who, in his 1943 publication Perelandra, observed,
Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic love of a fundamental polarity that divides all created beings.
Lewis understood that, as men and women, our very bodies participate in this deep primordial magic that is prior to the material creation but which the material expresses and embodies. Gender is more than biology but not less. Consequently, when we rebel against God’s pattern, we are rebelling against more than the regularities of the body God has given us; rather, we are rebelling against the entire gendered pattern of cosmology.
The line Crawford cited from Lewis (“gender is…a more fundamental reality than sex) is intriguing. You will hear, and even read on Wikipedia, that before 1970’s feminism, the English word “gender” was only used for grammatical categories. Yet in 1943, C.S. Lewis used gender in its archetypal meaning. The archetypal understanding of gender (regardless of what word we use and what language we are speaking) is, as we have seen, very ancient because it is rooted in primal creational patterns. (That is why, despite moves among social conservatives to jettison the term gender, I advocate retaining it. Moreover, there are other linguistic and historical reasons why gender is a useful term that I have explored elsewhere.)
Lewis, as a Neoplatonist, was steeped in archetypal symbology. Within various forms of Neoplatonism, the world soul was associated with nature, understood to be feminine. Nature gave embodiment to divine ideas, associated with the masculine archetype. When these concepts were Christianized, the masculine-feminine archetypes remained a dominant feature though incorporated into the up-down, heaven-earth dynamic of biblical cosmology. Consider the following example from the twentieth-century, as described by Carolyn Merchant in her book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution.
The twelfth-century Christian Cathedral School of Chartres, which interpreted the Bible in conjunction with the Timaeus, personified Natura as a goddess and limited the power attributed to her in pagan philosophies by emphasizing her subservience to God. Nature was compared to a midwife who translated Ideas into material things; the Ideas were likened to a father, the matter to a mother, and the generated species to a child. In Platonic and Neoplatonic symbolism, therefore, both nature and matter were feminine, while the Ideas were masculine. (p. 10)
These archetypal ideas ran so deep in the imagination of medieval Europe that in the initial stages of the scientific revolution, biological generation in nature was understood in terms of masculine-feminine archetypes.
Lewis worked within the same tradition of the Chartres academy in Christianizing Neoplatonic gender archetypes, as seen in his baptized treatment of Mars and Venus in his space trilogy. As Annie Crawford has shown in the aforementioned article, Lewis believed these primal patterns—prevalent in the ANE, paganism, and through to Neoplatonism—offered a glimpse into the bedrock structure of reality itself.
I think Lewis was correct, although I would go even further. Without understanding these primal patterns, we cannot truly appreciate the incarnation, which is a further unfolding of the male-female, heaven-earth, up-down symbology within the redemptive-historical narrative, in which the Ideas (or, to use the Biblical terminology of “the Word”) is given form (“made flesh”) by the feminine. Neoplatonism, no less than the temple symbology of the ancient world, reaches its apex in the Blessed Virgin, who becomes the embodiment of the archetype for true femininity.
The Blessed Virgin also embodies and fulfills the symbolism of the temple. When the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, the womb of the Blessed Virgin became a temple for receiving God’s restored presence on the earth, and the up-down, heaven-earth, male-female pattern came to take on an ever greater significance and fulfillment. Just as God’s Spirit had hovered over creation, moving upon the face of the waters to bring forth new life culminating in the Edenic temple, so the Holy Ghost overshadowed the Blessed Virgin to bring forth new life (Luke 1:35), making her womb a temple through which Eden is restored to the earth.
In order to fully understand the Blessed Virgin’s role, it will be helpful to briefly recap the temple symbolism of the ANE since the Blessed Virgin was a recapitulation of the true temple archetype from which ANE temples were corruptions.
The ANE retained a cultural memory of the primordial archetypal pattern whereby temples connect heaven and earth. But rather than connecting heaven and earth in life-giving worship, and thus empowering men to exercise godly dominion and empowering women to be bearers of new life, ANE temples became paradigmatic of the very opposite: they became a “control room” (using John Walton’s phraseology) from which men would brutally enact their god’s dominion through murdering and enslaving other nations, and they became sites by which women had their life sucked out of them through temple prostitution and the squandering of male seed. C.S. Lewis captured this in his depiction of an ANE temple in Till We Have Faces,
And I thought how the seed of men that might have gone to make hardy boys and fruitful girls was drained into that house, and nothing given back; and how the silver that men had earned hard and needed was also drained in there, and nothing given back; and how the girls themselves were devoured and were given nothing back.
This image is a frightening one but captures something of the terror of the ANE temple: instead of rivers of healing flowing out of the temple to nurture the families of the earth, the temples became black holes, sucking life into a void in which the loving and the devouring became identical. Rather than connecting mankind to heaven, these temples lowered man to the ground, reducing them to the status of beasts. Till We Have Faces may be fiction, but C.S. Lewis was well-versed in ancient texts, especially Greek literature, and he accurately captured the frightening dynamics of the ANE temple experience. (Incidentally, many of these demonic temple practices continued in parts of Hinduism through the 20th century, while abortion practices recapitulate the sense of the womb as a black hole that receives and then destroys life).
And that brings us back to the Blessed Virgin’s appropriation of temple symbolism. The Edenic temple, then David’s temple, then finally the temple of the Blessed Virgin’s womb, each functioned as the nexus for connecting heaven and earth. In each case, this heaven-earth synthesis initially occurred in a localized space, but always with the intention of the divine presence filling outward to make the entire earth a temple. Moreover, just as David’s temple was the reality for which Babel was a perversion, so the Blessed Virgin is the reality for which the demonic temples of the ANE were corruptions. Whereas ANE temples became sites of death—black holes that sucked out life and gave nothing back—her blessed womb gave embodiment and nourishment to the heavenly form, which then, through the Logos, expands outward from her body to encompass the entire earth. Indeed, just as Eden was a small part of the earth, which God’s images were tasked with expanding throughout the entire world, so the restored Eden begins local (initially, only in the Virgin’s womb) and, via the God-man she birthed, expands outward until the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ (Re. 11:15).
Within this ongoing expansion, the church occupies a feminine role in making the world hospitable to divine initiation – an initiation which occurs when He descends in the waters of baptism, and descends again in the Holy Eucharist. As we are receptive to divine initiation, the life of Christ, now literally in our bodies, produces new life, as we go out from Holy Communion to make all of reality Eucharistic, and to bring sacramental ordering to every department of experience through embodying His word in our lives and communities. But this occurs in layers of fractals, for though this happens in the sacraments and the preaching of the Word, it will occur on a more cosmic scale when the New Jerusalem descends to the earth. During the present phase of salvation history, as we straddle the already and the not-yet, the church continues fulfilling the feminine role of creating a sacred space for the heavenly bridegroom to come and inhabit.
Also during the present phase of salvation history, men and women continue reenacting the cosmic symbolism of the heaven-earth synthesis via the marriage bed. Through the life-giving potential of their “one flesh,” relationship (expressed chiefly in the behavioral conditions of human reproduction, even if and when the non-behavioral conditions do not pertain), they participate in the fruitfulness of God’s primal activity when He hovered over the face of the deep and brought life via the harmonizing of binaries (meaning-matter, day-night, land-sea, etc.) Marriage is thus symbolic, but not in the modern Protestant understanding of symbology where sign and signified have a merely extrinsic relationship, as a road sign of a deer points to the animal in a merely nominal way (to use an example given by Hans Boersma in Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry). Rather, marriage is symbolic because man and wife actually participate ontologically, whether knowingly or unknowingly, in the primal reality they signify.
This primal pattern unfolds in a further fractal in our own repentance from passion. This is where biblical theology brings us back, full circle, to Christian metaphysics. We saw that when God made the world, he spoke meaning into the void of non-being, and he gave form to chaos; we further saw that when God create men and women, He gave us with the vocation of sub-creation, that we too might continue speaking meaning into chaos, to make all of the world habitable for divine presence in an ever-unfolding doxology of movement from earth to heaven. This primordial pattern at the heart of reality means that, as humans, we have an upward yearning to unite with God, the plentitude of all being and the final source of true beatitude. But this desire to unite with God misfires onto passions which have the status of non-being. Passions have the status of non-being because evil is a privation of the good and a misdirection of our primary longing for God. Sin gives a surrogate ordering to our souls, structuring our lives according to the false telos of passions in a kind of parody of creation. But the message of the gospel is that God has again hovered over our world and descended into the chaos (first the darkness of the Virgin’s womb, then the darkness and chaos of 1st century Palestine, then via the continuation of New Creation into the darkness of the entire world) to lift us heavenward and repair the broken link between earth and heaven, the material and the spiritual, the sensible and the noetic.
Through repentance we cooperate with God’s new creation energies in speaking life into the non-being of our hearts, in order that the chaos of our disordered soul might become habitable for God’s presence. When we engage in this type of creative repentance, we participate in the healing of the cosmos. This creative process of repentance. The church gives us the resources for this type of creative repentance. Everything from breath prayers that reorient out attention back to God, to networks of spiritual mentoring, to the spiritual disciplines of a prayer rule, liturgical seasons, confession, bodily postures, fasting, etc., invite us to engage in self-emptying so that God can fill the darkness of our chaotic soul with life. When things go wrong in our life—when we get sick, experience poverty, lose our youth, watch loved-ones suffer, and ultimately face our own looming deaths—this can lead either to despair or to the voluntary self-emptying that invites God to fill us more fully so that, both in this life and the one to come, we can participate in the very redemption of the cosmos.
Creation and SSR in the Redemptive Historical Narrative
Living on this side of the eschaton, in the “not yet” of the redemptive-historical timeline, it is important to be attentive to how gender can be distorted. As images of God, our very bodies (including our anatomical details and biological functions), embody metaphysical, cosmological and redemptive-historical symbolism. Yet this symbolism can be distorted, either through natural evil (such as birth defects, as referenced in prop 9d above) or through moral evil (dysteleological behaviors and philosophies that distort our very concept of gender, sex, and marriage).
These distortions of gender were apparent in the ANE, even while the culture retained a corrupted memory of gender archetypes. A classic example of primordial memory combined with distortion is the story of Thetis and Zeus from Greek mythology. In the biblical account, the masculine God hovers over the emptiness of the watery expanse to bring forth new life. This new life is harmonious and joins together the binaries of earth and sky, dry land and sea, day and night, man and woman, while prefiguring the union of heaven and earth when God’s Spirit hovered over the emptiness of the virgin’s womb to unite humanity with divinity (Luke 1:35). The echoes of this in Greek mythology portray the watery expanse as the sea goddess Thetis, whose relation to the sky-god Zeus is marked by conflict.
Given widespread corruptions of gender in the postlapsarian condition, God provided rules in the Torah to guard against corruptions. For example, He issued laws prohibiting men dressing up like women and vice versa (Deut 22:5). Similarly, the expansion of humankind throughout the earth became disordered early on in the Genesis narrative, with all sorts of vices growing up around the means for reproduction, including vices that eventually made the flood necessary. But these confusions about sex and gender were symptoms of a larger cosmic disorder that God is putting right in Christ. And that brings us back to Paul’s epistle to the Romans, the true significance of which is missed when we neglect to read it with a redemptive-historical lens.
In the theological argument of Romans, Paul constantly returned to the Garden of Eden, where God had originally declared His intention to make the entire earth Edenic under the faithful stewardship of men and women. After the fall, this vision seemed to recede further from sight, as men and women turned from being mediators of heaven and earth, to being merely earthly. Instead of living out and embodying the symbolism embedded in creation (Rom 1:20), and thus raising the things of earth to heaven, mankind became like the beasts, “four-footed animals and creeping things.” (1:23).
(It is worth noting that this theme of humans descending to the level of the beasts, which surfaces in many places besides Romans 1 (see Dan. 4:16 & Ps 49:12) is portrayed in one of my favorite movies, the 2005 King Kong, produced and directed by Peter Jackson. This film wonderfully portrays the human vocation of raising up the beasts, as the giant ape Kong becomes gentle and sensitive to beauty under the gentle influence of Ann Darrow. Meanwhile, the character of Carl Denham, like the savages encountered on the island where Kong dwells, becomes beast-like as he sacrifices people for his goal of turning Kong into entertainment. The dynamic between the human-like beast and the beast-like humans create the central tension of the narrative.)
Back to Paul’s argument in Romans 1. As Paul describes the turn away from the human vocation, he argues that this is correlated with the following three exchanges:
- the exchange of the Creator for the creature (1:23)
- the exchange of the truth of God for a lie (1:25);
- the exchange of male-female relationships for homosexuality (26-27)
These three exchanges described by the Apostle are not just different ways we sin, but represent an abandonment of the human vocation given in Genesis 1; through these exchanges, we become sub-human and resemble the beasts over which we were given dominion. But rather than simply leaving men and women to wallow in their beast-like behaviors, Paul describes God’s rescue operation. As Paul begins explaining explicitly in chapter 4, this rescue operation began with one man (Abraham) and worked outward, using the descendants of Abraham to restore peace and proper order to the world. In covenant after covenant with His people, God promised faithfully to fulfill his plan to heal the earth and to bring justice (which, to the Hebrew mind, means the right ordering of the world). Paul situates Abraham’s vocation in terms of creation-recreation (compare Abraham’s vocation, described in Rom 4:17 as calling into existence the things that are not, with God’s act of calling the world to being in Genesis 1).
All this would have been background to the Jews in diaspora to whom Paul addressed his epistle to the Romans. They were not primarily concerned with the doctrine of personal justification as it later came to be understood as a formula for individual salvation. Rather, when we understand the historical context (which N.T. Wright lays out very helpfully in What Saint Paul Really Said), the Jews living in Rome were concerned with the covenant faithfulness of God against the larger backdrop of creation, fall, exile, and occupation. The exile and occupation seemed to indicate that God had not been faithful to the Abrahamic covenant. When Jesus came and announced New Creation and opened the covenant up to Gentiles, one can imagine this created a range of questions for Jewish believers. Who are God’s covenant people? Has God’s plan for the earth changed? Has the church replaced Israel? If so, how does God’s covenant with Abraham fit into the picture? Are we now living in the New Creation or is that still to come? These questions are the background context to Romans.
(It is worth pointing out, parenthetically, that this larger picture has tended to be obscured by (a) post-reformation readings of Romans, wherein the redemptive-historical significance of Paul’s argument is eclipsed by fixation with soteriology, (b) a tendency not to read Romans as a whole, but as an isolated series of theological doctrines and practical lessons. To give an example of the former, if a reading session starts in the middle of Romans, it might be easy to conclude that the epistle is a treatise on how to be saved. But if one reads the whole book in a single setting, it becomes clearer that chapter 1 and chapters 12-16 are bookends that contextualize the middle of the epistle, which can then be understood, not so much about how to be saved, as about God’s plan to heal the earth, and the role of His covenant people, the church, in that process. Individual salvation, though it factors in the Pauline discussion, occurs within a larger cosmic template.)
Given these questions that were circulating among the Jewish believers, it makes sense why Paul would begin the letter by appealing to the creation account. Paul’s argument is that when a society rejects the knowledge of God, people in that society are given over to a debased mind, a primary symptom of which is idolatry (the break-up of our image-bearing vocation given in Genesis 1-3) and homosexuality (the breakup of the natural male/female model rooted in Genesis 1-3). This is the basic statement of a theme that the rest of the epistle explores (in musical terms, we might say, it is the opening motif that gets developed through an array of variations). The topics that Paul delves into in the succeeding chapters—from the renewed Eden made possible by the Second Adam, to how the image of God is restored in the new Israel —offer an answer to this basic problem of Romans 1 and ultimately vindicate God’s covenant faithfulness.
Paul’s answer is that God’s covenant faithfulness is vindicated through the restoration of the image of God in the Second Adam (Christ) and in the New Israel (Church). But before Paul gives the solution, he spends chapter 1 doubling-down on the problem: namely how sin has warped the image of God, turning people away from their God-given nature to beast-like behaviors he describes as “contrary to nature” or “against nature.” As with the rest of the epistle, the touchstone for what is natural is God’s design in Eden, initially the Genesis creation, but fulfilled in Christ—the Second Adam who brings the New Eden, the advance signs of which we experience now through the type of holy living described in the last five chapters of the epistle.
Seen in this broader context, Romans 1:26-27 isn’t just Paul making a homophobic swipe at widespread homosexuality in 1st century Mediterranean culture, nor is he engaging in parenthetical outrage at the lack of stable monogamous SSR at the time. Rather, he is describing what happens to humans when they become corrupted away from the proper ordering of creation, as revealed in Genesis 1-3.
A few verses before his condemnation of homosexuality in 1:26-27, Paul had made a similar argument regarding idol worship, which he also sees as disordered according to verities that have been in place “since the creation of the world.” (Rom. 1:2). In the discussion of idolatry, Paul appealed to the doctrine of the image of God, described in Genesis when God created mankind to be bearers of His glory. Paul’s argument is that as this image becomes corrupted, instead of bearing the glory of God, we become like an image of beasts; as he puts it, “they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man–and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.” (2:22-23) Paul’s reference to the image of God brings to mind Genesis 1:27 where we read “So God created man in his own image; in the image of God He created him.” (Gen. 1:27). Significantly, the very next words in Genesis 1 describes the man-woman binary (“male and female He created them”), while the very next verse in Romans launches into the discussion of ways we dishonor our bodies through the breakdown of the man-woman complementarity established at creation. I don’t think this is a coincidence: Paul is tightly following the text of Genesis to argue that both idolatry and homosexuality deviate away from the natural ordering established by God at creation.
This type of reasoning is not unique to Romans 1. Throughout the Pauline corpus, his theology is set against the drama of creation and new creation. Accordingly, Paul’s pastoral theology is concerned with showing what it means to live in the renewed Eden that was inaugurated at the incarnation and will be consummated at the second coming—in short, how to be truly human. That is why, in Ephesians 5 and elsewhere, Paul returns to Genesis in general, and the sexual complementarity of Adam and Eve in particular, to foreground not only ethics, but also eschatology and the entire sacramental vision. For Paul, the sexual complementarity in marriage, and the corresponding polarities associated with that complementarity, is fundamental to our participation in a primal pattern at the core of God’s work on the earth.
The coming together of male and female is part of a larger pattern of creational binaries (day and night, dry land and sea, virility and fertility, etc.) which culminates in heaven and earth being united in Christ’s marriage to His church. This larger pattern, which spans creation to New Jerusalem, is so fundamental to what it means to be human that it cannot be compromised (for example, by saying that sexual complementarity is extrinsic rather than essential to true marriage) without the disordering of our human-ness described in Romans 1.
Abstraction from Teleology and the Perverse Use of Creation
Paul’s rich vision of the world, permeated with the creation symbolism of the Old Testament, is largely absent from modern understandings. Even believers often struggle to see Paul’s discussion of homosexuality in Romans 1 within the larger economy of purpose through which Christian sexual ethics derives its distinctively normative character. However, after exploring Romans 1 through the lens of the redemptive-historical narrative, it should by now be clear that Paul’s condemnation of both idolatry and homosexuality flows out of a rich teleological vision of the world, rooted in the sacramentality of the Genesis narrative. It is this teleological, sacramental and metaphysical vision that we must recover if we are to mount an adequate response to the present moral crisis.
Absent a teleological-sacramental worldview, we inevitably perceive the world as so much raw material that achieves meaning through mere agency. The individual then stands as a god before a world without form and void, conferring meaning on all things through devising a use for them. But use, separated from submission to biblically-grounded teleology can only lead to an ecosystem of perverse utility functions which distort man’s place in creation and his relation to nature. As Oliver O’Donovan remarked in Resurrection and Moral Order:
Abstraction from teleology creates a dangerous misunderstanding of the place of man in the universe. For it supposes that the observing mind encounters an inert creation–not, that is, a creation without movement, but a creation without a point to its movement. Thus the mind credits to its own conceptual creativity that teleological order which is, despite everything, necessary to life. All ordering becomes deliberative ordering, and scientific observation, failing as it does to report the given teleological order within nature, becomes the servant of techne. Of course, man continues to eat vegetables; but he no longer knows that he does so because vegetables are food, and comes to imagine that he has devised a use for them as food. And so he looks for other uses for them, which will seem to him to have as much validity as that one which was, if he could only have remembered it, given in nature. That vegetables exist as food for other animals than himself will not impress him–unless, of course, the continued existence of other animals too falls within his deliberative purposes for the world, in which case both vegetation and animal life will continue to hold their value as a feoff from himself. Thus arises the irony of our own days, in which the very protection of nature has to be argued in terms of man’s ‘interest’ in preserving his ‘environment’. Such a philosophy offers no stable protection against the exploitation of nature by man, since he can discern nothing in the relations of things to command his respect. And, of course, this unprincipled domination must extend itself to include his own psychosomatic nature, all that is not itself the devising mind, so that humanity itself dissolves in the polarization of the technological will and its raw material. Man’s monarchy over nature can be healthy only if he recognizes it as something itself given in the nature of things, and therefore limited by the nature of things. For if it were true that he imposed his rule upon nature from without, then there would be no limit to it. It would have been from the beginning a crude struggle to stamp an inert and formless nature with the insignia of his will. Such has been the philosophy bred by a scientism liberated from the discipline of Christian metaphysics. It is not what the Psalmist meant by the dominion of man, which was a worshipping and respectful sovereignty, a glad responsibility for the natural order which he both discerned and loved.
The revolt from what O’Donovan calls “the nature of things” finds expression in a radical particularism that flinches from the suggestion that certain things might be designed for certain uses. To pre-modern man, it seemed obvious that the wings of bluetits were made for flying, and consequently that it would be perverse to keep birds locked in cages. It made sense that the webbed feet of ducks were made for swimming, and that it would therefore be perverse to house them in coups like chickens. And it would have seemed equally perverse to suggest that the anus is for sex. Not even ancient sodomites would have gone so far as to suggest an ontological caesura between design and purpose, or to treat final causation as a mere conceptual imposition. But today, the actuality of the real has lost all spontaneous authority, and many otherwise sane people will assert that vulva are no more “meant” for sex than the anus. Yet even the normalization of perversion cannot eradicate the symbolic meaning that remains inescapably attached to our bodies, our behaviors, and the world. If we refuse to inhabit the symbolism associated with our vocation as God’s images then we will inescapably inhabit the symbolism of being mere beasts. And that is exactly what has happened with homosexuality.
Consider that the ground, with its microbes and bio-organisms that break things down, is a beautiful way that God renews life; moreover, consider that within the economy of design, certain creatures (i.e., worms, ants, flies, and even some mammals) are attracted to death and decay in order to contribute to the decomposition process. When mankind rejects his heavenly vocation and instead becomes like the beasts, then rather than raising earth to heaven, man becomes fixated entirely on the earth: hence, a focus on death and decay, and a turn from relationships that are life-giving (man-woman) to relationships that are sterile and destructive (SSR). Accordingly, it is symbolically “appropriate” that there would emerge from this milieu a fixation with sex acts focused on the part of the body that most participates in the earth’s cycle of decay and decomposition, namely the anus.
The fixation with the anus is more global than simply male SSR, for commentators have noted that there has been a recent shift in the porn industry away from female breasts to the anus, and away from pictures and videos suggestive of intercourse-readiness, to pictures and videos in which sex is just another form of violence, and therefore death-readiness. But this is to be expected when we dehumanize ourselves: the human being, deprived of any organic relation to his God-given vocation, reduces himself to the level of a worm, gravitating toward death and the site of excrement. Thus, instead of fulfilling our high-priestly role of raising earth to heaven, these new sexual trends draw humans down to the level of the ground.
Beyond the Instrumentation of Moral Theology
I have argued that it is imperative for the church to follow St. Paul in situating theological anthropology in general, and Christian sexual ethics in particular, within larger organizing structures that have historically given coherence to our faith. I have outlined the shape of two such structures, namely the Christian metaphysical framework and the redemptive-historical narrative. I have argued that both of these open up a rich tapestry of cosmic symbolism in which to situate our identity as men and women. In actual fact, however, theological metaphysics and redemptive-historical readings should not be seen as two separate structures, given that theological metaphysics emerge from the redemptive-historical narrative, while the metaphysical framework indicates the nature of reality in which the redemptive-historical narrative is situated. Nevertheless, for purely organizational purposes, I have discussed these structures separately.
Both the metaphysical framework and the redemptive-historical narrative are important for integrating is with ought, and therefore contextualizing Christian sexual virtues in the broader economy of teleology, cosmology, and human flourishing. Without these organizing structures, Christian moral teaching regarding SSR lacks coherence and at best comes to function as an add-on to a worldview defined by the anti-transcendent mood of the cultural zeitgeist. Without a genuinely Christian understanding of the earth, nature, the heaven-earth synthesis, what so often passes for the “Christian worldview” is little more than belief in a spiritually passive world in which Christian doctrines and moral codes are simply layered into a secular world picture. That secular picture, as Matthew Lee Anderson pointed out here at Mere Orthodoxy, involves an erosion of the distinction between acts and persons, resulting in an “unrelenting therapeuticization of our moral lives — which renders the prohibition on same-sex unions almost unintelligible today.”
Many self-styled “conservative” Christians, in holding ground against SSR through an ethic of raw command, have inadvertently contributed to the very conditions whereby Christian moral teaching has become largely unintelligible. Lacking broader metaphysical and redemptive-historical structures, we find it normal for Christians—again, even self-consciously conservative Christians—to hold to a fragile sexual ethic insufficiently robust to withstand the intellectual and personal pressures to disconnect acts from persons and to embrace what Anderson calls “unrelenting therapeuticization of our moral lives.” Thus it is entirely expected that every year, thousands of Christians, and sometimes entire churches, abandon deteleological legalism for various forms of baptized utilitarianism, both two sides of the same sub-Christian coin.
The tragedy of this moral fragility is not merely tactical, as if the metaphysical, symbolic, and redemptive-historical frameworks simply offer more useful tools when discussing contentious moral issues, or provide useful mechanisms for enabling us to “believe stronger.” Rather, the real tragedy is that believers themselves have abandoned a genuinely biblical understanding of reality, having exchanged the beautiful tapestry of Christian metaphysics for a type of functional atheism, a spiritually passive world that becomes meaningful only through law, now conceived according to the deontological mood of post-Kantian ethics. We have lost the rich symbolic vision of historic Christianity—one in which there are real correspondences between earthly experience and heavenly order—for a world-picture that is essentially deism softened by allowance for miracles, materialism softened by eagerness to prove “intelligent design,” and voluntarism/nominalism softened by legalistic piety. It is no surprise that the raw command of God becomes the only mechanism by which we can assert a static moral order, however arbitrary and tenuous that order might ultimately be. But the will of God, now instrumentalized as a reactionary weapon in the culture wars against liberal protestants and secular leftists, loses the transcendent moorings that once gave appeals to God’s will both intelligibility and durability. “Rejection of transcendence,” as Carlo Lancellotti reminds us in an essay on Augusto Del Noce, “implies that all human realities (the state, sexuality, work, the family) lose their symbolic or ideal significance and become ‘dumb.’”
Stripped of transcendence and symbolic significance, God’s commands come to function in the church like MacIntyre believed virtue does in a secular society, existing in a merely fragmentary form, the remnants of an older tradition that once provided a coherence and durability now absent. To be sure, when we look at conservative churches most engaged in defending marriage and gender, lack of durability is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. But this is only because the ultimate fragility of Christian moral conviction has been obscured by various intensifiers (i.e., using opposition to SSR as the primary litmus test for doctrinal orthodoxy, urging that this should be a friendship-destroying issue, achieving a false certainty through denying the complexity of the issue, insisting that theological opponents must be motivated in bad faith, creating ideological purity cultures around opposition to SSR, etc.). But these intensifiers only mask the fragility of moral conviction, allowing activists to imagine they are “conserving” a Christian moral legacy even as they inadvertently participate in its evisceration. To quote again from Matthew Lee Anderson’s piece,
Mainline denominations have often functioned as a foil for evangelicals who sought to build a bulwark against the world’s encroachment into the church. Some corners of evangelicalism self-consciously adopted the dictum that an institution that is not proactively being conservative will soon become progressive. Despite their invocations of tradition against Protestant liberalism, though, such communities are not so much ‘conserving’ as instrumentalizing what they have received while reacting against perceived threats. Social pressures on traditional religious believers have sometimes prompted us to inflate our rhetoric regarding the clarity and certainty of our positions.
But the use of intensifiers in an argument is often indicative of anxiety rather than real confidence. At some point, the reactionary does protest too much. Moreover, starting theological reflection in an oppositional context tends to distort one’s own commitments by creating emphases that would not be needed otherwise. Evangelicals in the 1980s and 90s anxious about feminism sought maximal theological protection in the Trinity, only to discover in the 2010s that they had endorsed actual heresies (the irony needs no comment). So it sometimes goes when the sociological horse drives the theological cart.
I think Anderson is correct. An agenda-driven moral theology that leaves behind the metaphysical and redemptive-historical frameworks of our tradition (perhaps in the interest of “cutting to the chase” to more quickly reach for content that can be instrumentalized for pressing moral battles), only leaves believers unequipped against the flat reductionist worldview wrought by Enlightenment rationalism and materialist science—two of the very ideologies that have contributed to marriage revisionism and gender reductionism. Furthermore, legalistic moral theology inevitably leads to not stricter standards of moral purity but laxity, for we lose any sense of the structural dimensions of sin at a level far deeper than mere deviation from behavioral prohibitions. Indeed, we lose an understanding for how sin has left our affections misshapen, how Adam’s trespass has left a deep wound on our soul that cannot be measured purely in terms of transgressive behavior. One case in point is that because legalism focuses merely on the symptoms of sin, collapsing morality into an ethic of raw command, it feeds the popular belief that same-sex attraction is not sinful provided one does not act on that attraction.
Finally, an agenda-driven moral theology also leaves us without the type of symbolic thinking that can show what things actually mean, rather than simply what things are made of or what things can do for us instrumentally. A case in point are today’s twin confusions about gender which, though at one level opposite, feed off each other symbiotically. On the one hand, there is the tendency to completely divorce gender from anatomy, as seen in various forms of gender reductionism, sexual existentialism, and non-essentialism. But on the other hand, there is also a move—which, ironically, many social conservatives share in common with gender reassignment surgeons—to reduce gender to anatomy (often as part of a larger aesthetic of anthropological minimalism), as if our identity as men and women finally amounts to simply what we are made of, how we are shaped, and how we are used. The fact that social conservatives and gender reassignment ideologues have come into such close alignment at precisely the point where they appear most disparate, has led to bizarre situations where the two sides are now unable even to articulate where and why they disagree. The problem is that we have rushed into activism before understanding metaphysics—in good American fashion, prioritizing doing over thinking. But an agenda-driven moral theology is proving insufficient for the subtlety of contemporary challenges.
The vacuity of an agenda-driven theology becomes evident in how social conservatives are generally inept at answering the infertility challenge. Gender non-essentialists and marriage revisionists alike fixate on female infertility and post-menopausal sex as phenomena that supposedly disrupt traditional theologies of sexuality, placing heterosexual and homosexual relationships on the same plane. But within a transcendent sacramental view of the world, this counter argument recedes into anachronism. The participation of a person or couple in the cosmic symbolism of sex and gender can no more be reducible to behavior and function than it can be separated from it, given that meaning exists prior to function and continues to exist regardless of whether all functions and potencies are actualized. For example, the spiritual meaning of a woman whose very body participates in the feminine symbolism of the heaven-earth synthesis in a particular way different from the man, is not nullified by the existence of women who are unable or unwilling to actualize that potential in some or all ways. And, of course, the same can be said in reverse for men. The point is that men and women continue bearing the spiritual, cosmological and sacramental meaning of their God-given gender even if they would renounce it (for example, through entertaining the conceit that they can transition into another gender), just as the Eucharist continues bearing a certain spiritual meaning even when an individual denies that meaning or partakes unworthily.
What is true of gender is also true of marriage: the sacramental and cosmic significance of sexual intercourse exists when a man and woman participate in the behavioral aspects of human reproduction even if the non-behavioral conditions for reproduction do not pertain. We can say this because, within a sacramental worldview, persons are not mere instruments; accordingly, human activity has been invested with a spiritual symbolism that is prior to mere use. Sexual intercourse between a man and woman participates ontologically in the primal reality they signify, which is why Paul can describe sexual activity between a man and a prostitute using the prelapsarian language of Adam and Eve’s union (1 Cor. 6:16).
And that brings us back to the problem of infertile women. Precisely because meaning exists prior to function and continues to exist regardless of whether all functions and potencies have been actualized, the possibility of infertile women is not a Trojan horse for gay-affirming metaphysics, let alone a bit of uncomfortable epiphenomena that defenders of traditional marriage have to find ingenious ways for explaining. Indeed, the symbolism of marriage, and the larger archetype of gendered polarities in which Genesis situates the man-woman complementarity, is no more undermined by the existence of infertile women than it is by the possibility of couples having sex after menopause since, as Abigail Favale reminds us in her response to Matt Walsh:
The procreative potentiality of women exists whether or not it is ever brought to fruition: pre-pubescent girls have it; post-menopausal women have it; women who are infertile have it. This innate potential can be prevented from being actualized, but it can never be taken away—nor granted to someone who does not have it. The very category of ‘infertility’ points back to this fact, naming an inherent potential that is, for whatever reason, unable to actualize.
Though it may seem obvious that ‘infertility’ points back to fertility as normative, there is much confusion here, as there also exists much confusion about various dysteological conditions that have arisen out of our falleness, such as androgen insensitivity syndrome, intersex conditions, hormonal disruption caused by pollutants, etc. What tends to be overlooked is that DYSteleology implies a real teleology. After all, we would not say that someone born with only one leg is defective unless we had reason to think it was normative to have two legs; similarly, the concept of infertility would be meaningless if fertility was not normative. We can call a woman “infertile” because we know her body was designed for fertility, that the form is there in her body whether or not it is working, and whether she is willing or able to actualize that potency. We recognize this with everything else: for example, if someone had damaged eyesight, we would not infer that the eyes were not made for vision. Rather, we would try to correct the damaged eyes in order that they might achieve their proper telos.
Some women, though not infertile, will choose to express their femininity by becoming nuns, just as some men will express their masculinity in becoming monks. Similarly, some married couples will express intimacy in legitimate ways they know will not lead to procreation. In the minds of many, this abrogates the symbolic meaning of our gendered bodies. As one man recently pointed out to me in a letter, “There is no sense in which a couple that knows they are infertile (and this would include any couple that knows they are having sex outside the 5ish day window in each month when a female is fertile) and is having sex is participating in some symbolic reality that is not also available to those in SSRs.” But consider, if the teleology of gender is indeed rooted in the archetypal and sacramental symbology charted above, then the body’s participation in this sacramental symbolism is not reducible to—or present merely in—the specific physiological and behavioral particulars that express that archetype, because the archetypal form is prior to function. A man bears within himself the meaning of the Sacred Masculine even if he is not a father or husband; a woman bears within her body the meaning of the Sacred Feminine even if she is not a mother or wife; sexual intercourse participates in the cosmic symbolism outlined above even during the times of a woman’s cycle or lifespan when reproduction is impossible or when sexual intimacy is expressed in ways that will not lead to conception. However, to say that the symbolic meaning of having a male or female body is not reducible to how that symbolism is expressed sexually is not to say that any type of sexual activity can be exchanged for any other and still be consonant with that the symbolic meaning of our bodies. On the contrary, precisely because form is prior to function, some behaviors are more fitting than others. Indeed, Paul’s whole point in Romans 1 is that it is possible to put our bodies to uses that are quite incongruous with true symbolic meaning of our bodies.
As is often the case, objections like these arise because, following centuries of Protestantism and modernism, we have become conditioned to think of “symbol” in reductionistic terms. One of the results of the de-symbolized hyper-reified framework of modern reductionism (whether explicitly affirmed or implicitly assumed), is that modern man loses the sense of natural teleology that arises organically from a redemptive-historical understanding of ourselves and our symbology. This loss can be seen in modern man’s discomfort attaching meaning to non-actualized potencies since his social imaginary has been conditioned by an existentialism in which there can be no objective naming prior to existence; no archetypal or transcendent significance that might imbue the facts of existence with a meaning that is prior to agency, function, or use. Accordingly, rather than seeing female fertility as a potency with a symbolic meaning independent of a specific female’s ability to actualize that potency, it becomes a mere fact emptied of inherent meaning in a cosmos of only brute facts, now rendered vacuous and “dumb.” The result is what the 20th century Italian philosopher, Augosto Del Noce, described as a radical anti-Platonism that, in the words of his interpreter, Carlo Lancellotti, ends up “denying the ideal/symbolic dimension and the possibility of an ‘other’ reality, of a world outside of Plato’s cave.”