An Architectural Analogy
The natural givenness of the sexes and the resulting construction of society in pretechnological eras was fairly stable. It was like a stone wall of cyclopean masonry—think of Mycenae or Machu Picchu—in which the force of gravity works upon the mass of each stone, and the stones are fitted together in such a way that their forces and counter-forces produce a stable unity that both protects the integrity of each stone in itself, and unites them together into a larger edifice that is strong and accomplishes the aims for which it was built.
Unfortunately, aims change. Think now of the stones of a Gothic cathedral. No longer are the stones behaving quite so stonishly. They are shaped into soaring piers, fan vaults and the tracery of rose windows. Unlike the stones of Mycenae, packed together in thick, sturdy cyclopean walls, the stones of Chartres are interrupted to make room for acres of stained glass. And because the walls are so preposterously thin and tall, the forces of gravity, far from being productive of their strength and unity, have become an enemy to their integrity: they would collapse if they were not propped up by elaborate system of flying buttresses.
It is a beautiful accomplishment, no doubt: most of us would prefer Salisbury Cathedral to Stonehenge. But it is a tour de force. We gasp in astonishment that stone, which by nature seeks a downward place in the Aristotelian cosmos, has been made to soar so high and perform such feats under the hands of architects and masons.
If Mycenae or Stonehenge is a metaphor for societies that work with the nature of stones, a Gothic cathedral is modern technological society. It presses the sexes into new configurations and functions. It produces egalitarianism and the fungibility of the sexes. We may think, with certain Marxists, agrarians, and traditionalists, that this is a bad thing. Or we may think, with other Marxists, feminists, and most of modern academia, that it is a good thing. But what we cannot deny is that it is a new and unnatural thing. It involves using stones in ways that stretch the limits of their natural constitution. And the result has been a change in social plausibility structures, the decentering of the natural family, the removal of stigma from many things that had been forbidden before, and, to crown all, the newfound social acceptability of new sexual identities such as homosexuality and transgenderism.
Another way of saying all this is that it is only under technological society that anyone has ever needed to do the work of constructing a sexual identity. As Jim Pocta points out in his contribution to this conversation, one’s identity as a man or woman was simply given in all previous ages. Even if one was not personally called or capable of marriage or parenthood, one’s sex was nonetheless given and comprehensible within that larger social normativity.
Before World War II, Rebecca West visited the Balkans and wrote a book about her travels, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. In it, she reflects on three men whom she observed in the town of Korchula:
They were all three beautiful, with thick, straight, fair hair and bronze skins and high cheekbones pulling the flesh up from their large mouths, with broad chests and long legs springing from arched feet. These were men, they could beget children on women, they could shape certain kinds of materials for purposes that made them masters of their worlds. I thought of two kinds of men that the West produces: the cityish kind who wears spectacles without shame, as if they were the sign of quality and not a defect, who is overweight and puffy, who can drive a car but knows no other mastery over material, who presses buttons and turns switches without comprehending the result, who makes money when the market goes up and loses it when the market goes down; the high-nosed young man, who is somebody’s secretary or is in the Foreign Office, who has a peevishly amusing voice and is very delicate, who knows a great deal but far from all there is to be known about French pictures.[1]
Mastery of material. Begetting children on women. Shaping things for purposes. Notice how West’s epitome of masculinity comports with the male body’s propensities and abilities in ways that incentivize, fulfill, and glorify them. By contrast, West’s “men of the West” (no Numenoreans, they!) are products of a culture that incentivizes, produces, and even perversely glorifies things that she considers “defects.”
The same phenomenon can be seen in the case of women. In the same chapter, shortly after her description of the three young men of Korchula, West considers a Korchulan noblewoman, a relative of one of the three:
She said, “It’s too quiet. I liked it when there were children about, laughing, and then crying, and then laughing again. That’s how it ought to be in a house.” She spoke with complete confidence, as one who expresses an opinion held by all the world. A house with children is better than a house without children. That she assumed to be an axiom, on that she had founded all her life and pride. It was as if she were a child herself, a fragile child who had escaped death by a miracle and was boasting of its invulnerability to all ills. Her life had for the most part been secure because in her world men had been proud to be fathers, and had marvelled gratefully at women for being fine-wrought enough to make the begetting of children an excitement, and sturdy enough to bear them and rear them, and had thought of the mother of many children as the female equivalent of a rich man. Because these masculine attitudes had favoured her feminine activities, her unbroken pride was lovely as the trumpet of a lily. It might have been different for her if she had been born into a society where men have either lost their desire for children, or are prevented from gratifying it by poverty or the fear of war. There she would have been half hated, and perhaps more than half, for her sex. Her womb, which here was her talisman, would have been a source of danger, which might even strike at the very root of her primal value, and one day make her husband feel that the delight he had known with her was not worth the price he must pay for it.[2]
As with the men, so with the women, the characteristic actions and callings of the sexes are in concord with the nature of the sexed body: “Her womb was her talisman.” “I liked it when there were children about.”
West wrote in 1936. What would she think now of the state of womanhood in Western society, with the American fertility rate at 1.71 children per woman as of 2019? West looks at Korchulan society as an outsider, a Westerner whose own society is one in which the forces of modernity have already made motherhood more difficult and manliness almost gelded. Writing in 1936, West views Korchula’s impending loss of these things with poignant pity, knowing that the day will come when modern industrial society will overwhelm even these men and women with its unnatural forces of attentuation and compulsion. Indeed, West adds, the sons of the proud Korchulan matriarch, though descended from ships’ captains, were already employed by great steamship lines.
As Alastair notes in his initial piece for this conversation, and as Ivan Illich has explained at more length, technological society requires sexual egalitarianism.[3] And egalitarianism makes natural sexual identity extremely difficult: the natural inclinations and functions of male and female minds and bodies are at odds with technological society’s norms. Birth control pills, ADHD medications, and Viagra must be prescribed. Fertility must be suppressed, “toxic masculinity” chastised. The effects of technological society on the body must be counteracted with artificial and otherwise pointless physical exercise.
It is not that masculinity and femininity are merely social constructions, or that they are merely performative — as though all would be well if women would just have babies and men would take up woodworking. But masculinity and feminity are grounded in realities created by God, and those created realities of manhood and womanhood do involve certain distinctive activities. An orca may still be an orca in captivity, but its dorsal fin will collapse and it will behave in pathological ways, because it was not made by God to swim laps around a tiny pool at SeaWorld. So too the sexes in technological modernity.[4]
A caveat is in order here: I am not pining for a return to pretechnological, preindustrial society. There are very many benefits to life in modernity, and even if we judged, as I do not, that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits, there is in any case no unringing the bell. But any way forward must proceed from an understanding of why sexual identity is so difficult and complicated in our day, and must reckon with the givenness of human bodies and the natures of the two sexes.
How do stones stand?
Modern society, then, is using human stones to build structures that work against the natural constitution of men and women. Worse, modernity often even denigrates things that the Bible considers good: having many children (“breeder”), chastity for men and women (“The 40-year-old Virgin”), feminine domesticity (“Desperate Housewives”), and natural marriage reflecting God’s design in creation (“heteronormativity”). In no prior age of the church has there been such a thing as a “sexual identity.” Such a thing has only emerged because the cultural pressures that would normally help us inhabit our sexed bodies and live male or female lives have been stripped away. Without these forces, men and women are like astronauts whose organs are malfunctioning in zero gravity, or teetering blocks in a game of Jenga rather than stones securely fitted into a stable and sturdy wall.
Alastair Roberts’ initial article in this conversation discusses the phenomenology of sexual identity. I heartily echo his observation of the “gender neutralization” of the spaces and communities of Western society. He also rightly observes that most people do not have a “sexual identity” in the same sense as members of the “LGBT community,” but rather thave a “strong sense of being men or women and of being in some sort of a charged relationship with the other sex.” I submit that we should see “sexual identity” as an attempt to fill the void left by a damaged sense of one’s natural sex. It can only occur within a modern technological society in which the various forces that support a healthy sexuality have become attenuated or lost.[5]
One of the most significant forces that has been lost is the inner regulation of sexual behavior by the sense of shame and guilt, which are the internalization of the moral judgments of others. In an important article, “Bring Back Stigma,” Roger Scruton has discussed the way shame has been removed from our societies, leaving the public sphere regulated by naked law, and the private sphere unregulated entirely. Scruton makes the case that stigma and taboo are just how sexual morality is internalized and enforced upon most people:
“By imbuing sexual feelings with psychological sanctions, traditional societies ensured that they were controlled by the person who feels them. As a result, sexual feelings were integrated into moral character, not governed from outside by laws and regulations, but from inside by the will…Take this inner control away, and what was previously a source of social cohesion becomes the cause of social decay.”[6]
When these psychological sanctions are removed, or when they are replaced with their opposites (so that biblical sexual identity is devalued or denigrated, while alternative sexual identities are celebrated), the result is social dissolution. Without any stigma attaching to sexual acts and inclinations that were once shameful, and that do not produce a one-flesh union of man and woman, there is no longer any means by which the human sexual impulse can be made to produce lasting family bonds. Sex is severed from reproduction, from marital commitment, from the march of generations.
Stigma, so important for effecting the internalization of sexual norms in the conscience of the individual, is now something that the church no longer feels it can wield. Seven years ago, Thabiti Anyabwile suggested that the gag reflex that is “triggered by an accurate description of homosexual behavior will be the beginning of the recovery of moral sense and sensibility when it comes to the so-called “gay marriage” debate. He was, of course, wrong, though not for the reasons his critics, such as Carl Trueman and Ron Belgau, said he was wrong. The successful destigmatization of homosexual acts was in fact accomplished by (1) presenting homosexuality to the public as a matter of identity instead of acts, and (2) by stigmatizing stigma, using the now well-known “-phobia” slur. A mere two years after Anyabwile’s article, gay marriage became legal in all 50 states. A few years later, we find that denominations like the PCA and the ACNA have vocal fifth columns of “side B” advocates who see it as a matter of empathetic care to use the language of “gay Christians” and “sexual identity,” even if they do not affirm homosexual sex acts. It is no longer even socially acceptable to express abhorrence at homosexuality. Even in “non-affirming” denominations, disapproval of homosexuality is expressed exclusively in what Alastair Roberts has noted are medical and neutral language. Words like “perversion,” “sodomy,” and “abomination” are not used. What the Bible stigmatizes, modern pastors do not dare to speak ill of. The result is that instead of being a shameful perversion practiced in secret (“the love that dare not speak its name”), homosexuality is now a live option that every Western child growing up must weigh as a mere matter of “figuring out” his sexual identity, since that is no longer a given: “Am I, perhaps, gay?” If the children of Christian parents are to remain chaste and honor God in the matter of their sexual identity, it will now have to be because they make a conscious choice to do so. For those who have a complicated, fraught, or abusive relationship with parents or other authority figures, the emotional and psychological costs of conforming to what Alastair Roberts calls the “scripts” of Biblical sexual identity are high. Personal choice in an “affirming” society is a much more fragile basis for faithful sexual identity than the church has ever had to rely on in any prior age of history.
Let us not forget that the norms of Biblical sexual morality that prevailed in the West until recently were hard won from the surrounding immorality of the Ancient Near East, and guarded from the equally immoral norms of the Greco-Roman culture into which the NT was written. How was sexual identity formed and guarded in the Bible? By fierce and powerful stigma. Sexual immorality defiles the temple of God. In Numbers 25, the elders of Israel were commanded to execute every man of Israel who had been enticed into the worship of Baal by committing sexual immorality (zenuth, LXX ἐκπορνεῦσαι) with the daughters of Moab. In the NT, the judicial death penalty may not be in force, but the severity of the offence is no less: the risen Christ threatens to destroy with death those who teach his servants to commit sexual immorality (Rev. 2:20-23). The apostle Paul does not tarry with half-measures: he urges the church at Corinth to “not to keep company with the sexually immoral (πόρνοι)” (1 Cor. 5:9) and to “put away from among yourselves the wicked person (τὸν πονερόν)” who has his father’s wife (1 Cor. 5:13).
The Torah also extirpated homosexuality from Israel, so that it was unheard of among Jews. It did so by instituting the (never historically inflicted) death penalty against men who have sex with men and by including sodomy in Leviticus 20’s of prohibitions of extraordinary sins like child sacrifice, incest, man-on-animal bestiality, woman-on-animal bestiality. In Leviticus 18, another prohibition of homosexual sex is sandwiched between prohibitions of child sacrifice and bestiality. These chapters show that sodomy was not on the level of eating non-kosher food or wearing mixed fabrics. It was considered one of the most extraordinary sexual sins in ancient Israel. The New Testament does not alter this condemnation of same-sex acts. Rather, it underscores it by derogatory language like “dogs,” “sexually immoral, adulterers, effeminate ones, those who lie with men” (πόρνοι, μοιχοί, μαλακοί, ἀρσενοκοῖται, 1 Corinthians 6:9) and the judgment that such persons are “unrighteous.” Paul includes homosexuality in his vice-lists because it was notoriously and uncontroversially sinful. As E.P. Sanders has noted, “we must assume that Paul did not actually face a case [of homosexuality] in one of his congregations; if he had, we would hear a lot more about it.”[7] It is something Gentiles do, not Jews. Christianity preserved the Old Testament’s sexual morality.
Modern LGBT mythology would have it that whenever homosexuality is criminalized and stigmatized in a society, there is always some fixed proportion of the population who are nonetheless attracted to the same sex, and experience the suppression of homosexuality in law and society as oppression, which causes them to suffer mental anguish and commit suicide—harms which should be laid at the feet of “heteronormativity” and “homophobia.” Passing over whether this argument is legitimate for our day, I note that it cannot legitimately be retrojected into the Bible. There is no evidence of closeted gay Israelites in antiquity. Ancient Israel was not a society of expressive individualism. Israelites were not in quest of their sexual identity. The conditions of modern homosexuality, enabled by technology and the de-gendering of society, had not yet arisen.
I have chosen homosexuality as one instance of sexual identity. I might just as easily have chosen the Bible’s valorization of domesticity for women, or the idea that only men should serve in the profession of arms. The point is that in the early Church and ancient Israel, believers had manhood and womanhood handed to them, complete with expectations, norms, blessings, and sanctions that comported with their sexed bodies. Self-understanding as men and women and righteous sexual behavior were reinforced by social stigma and honor, as they have been throughout history: betrothal, dowries, bride-prices, wedding ceremonies, bills of divorce, and public recognition of marital status are among the legal ordinances that channeled the sexual impulse in ways that made for the sexual well-being of Israelites. Such social reinforcements are not mere cruelty or persecution.[8] Rather, they are the natural and needed supports for sexual well-being, both of individuals and of a culture. They have all been greatly attenuated or abolished in our day.
There are two main consequences of the recognition that sexual identity is largely produced by social reinforcement. First, we cannot view the construction of sexual identity as a matter that Christians also can take in hand as a project to be done in the same way as the construction of a lesbian or transgender identity—as though sexual identity were like music or carpentry, just another task to be done, but which Christians can do Christianly. The task is rather to attempt to rebuild an ecclesial society that can hold in place the stones that God is building into His temple, so that men and women are reinforced and supported in their self-understanding as men and women, and are not precipitated on the fruitless and harmful quest to construct a sexual identity.
Second, because sexual identity is formed and reinforced socially, the Church needs to change the way it is approaching the question. It will not do to counter various immoral sexual identities with “identity in Christ.” Such “identity in Christ” remains merely notional unless it is given concrete social form. Even if the ACNA casts you out, “the Episcopal Church welcomes you.” The choice to be a churchgoer, or a traditionalist, or to believe that the Bible is the Word of God — these also are now matters of bespoke identity-construction, performative acts of expressive individualism, no less than marching in a Pride parade or getting body piercings.
I also do not have much confidence in Christian leaders’ ability to shepherd confused sexual identitarians who are struggling to figure out their own identity. We have a good three decades of experience with Christian leaders’ brittle and artificial solutions to the problems that modernity poses to the sexes, and the results cannot be called an unqualified success. We have the Quiverfull movement, the Biblical Courtship movement, the “women must not wear trousers” movement, etc. What they all have in common is that they are reactions against the abolition of organic norms maintained by society. In place of those organic norms, these movements impose ossified and performative legal requirements. The results are predictable. If this Theopolis Conversation doesn’t satisfy you about sexual identity, you might turn to Shannon Bonne, the ex-wife of Josh “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” Harris, who is penning a musical about “themes like identity, authenticity, gender roles and power in the conservative church.”
No one has the wisdom to guide others on these issues, because they have never been matters of guidance by a guru. They have always been shaped by society, and now society threatens Christian sexual identity. The fragility of legalistic impositions – courtship culture, modesty requirements, rules about women doing this or that (even the pastorate), the unhealthy fascination with performative masculinity – should be a salutary warning about the likelihood of the church’s success in guiding people to form sexual identities. I am not optimistic.
Can We Rebuild?
This is not a wonderful new opportunity. It is a crisis fraught with peril. Has the church ever faced a similar crisis? The closest thing that comes to my mind is the situation of the Corinthian church. When faced with Corinthians vaunting themselves upon their sexual freedom “in Christ,” Paul does not gently correct them or sooth them with therapeutic platitudes and assurances that he has heard their lived experience and understands the suffering of incestuously-oriented Christians under the harsh expectation of Christian purity culture. He excoriates the Corinthians for being “puffed up” (πεφυσιωμένοι ἐστέ, 1 Cor. 5:2) and tells them that they ought rather to mourn. This rebuke is actually a thorough repudiation of their assumptions about identity and sex. As David Daube puts it, “There is all the difference between being wicked—cheating, fornicating—and elevating what is normally considered wicked into a fine thing.”[9] Daube argues, persuasively in my view, that the Corinthians considered the incestuous relationship between a man and his father’s wife to be a badge of their liberty as new creations in Christ. In other words, it was a matter of their identity, even if not in exactly the same way as LGBT identity in our day. Yet the apostle Paul does not accomodate himself to the preferred identifiers or language of sexually immoral Christians. He has no patience at all for their incestuous Pride. What they view as a mark of their special identity, Paul views as “such πορνεῖα as is not even named among the Gentiles,” a stinging condemnation. He urges that the sexually immoral man be put out of the church. The stark finality of this amputation from the body of Christ is sometimes concealed by mistranslation of 1 Corinthians 5:5. For instance, the ESV: “you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord,” as though Paul hoped that the immoral man might yet make it into heaven, at the cost of physical chastisement. This is all quite alien to the context, for there is nothing about physical punishment. More importantly, the word “his” should not be supplied. Paul is contrasting the Spirit with the flesh, not as the soul and body of an individual man, but as the righteous and wicked members of the Corinthian church. His concern is that the cancer of sexual immorality not be allowed to spread: “Purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened.” (1 Cor. 5:7) There is nothing here about hoping for the salvation of the soul of the sexually immoral man. Paul may well hope for his conversion, but that is not his concern in 1 Corinthians 5. His concern is to prevent the church from being corrupted by sexual immorality.
Herman Bavinck offers some thoughts on how sexual immorality corrupts a human life. He says that procreation, conception, and birth are all carefully guarded by shame in the Bible, and this shame is enforced by the purification laws of the Old Testament. When we bring these matters out onto the stage, they become obscene (ob-scaena) and result in impurity in the soul: “This impurity begins with thoughts, but it also becomes a favored topic of discussion (among children, young men, and young women). It is fed and nurtured by the imagination, which turns abstract thought into images that are graphic, embodied, and living.”[10] Our society is radically pornographic, and that means that the sexual consciousness of many Christians has been warped. The stones with which God builds our families, churches, and other institutions are now, more than in past ages, impure stones. Their ability to fit together with other stones in a strong and permanent structure has been impaired.
In his contribution to this conversation, Peter Leithart correctly identifies sexual identity as a political category in our day. The degree to which sexual identity is political can hardly be overstated. And this politicization is another reason why sexual identitarianism is a threat to the church. This is why there is such tension over “side B” and Revoice and “gay Christians” in denominations like the PCA and ACNA. Many of those who have fled the mainline as sexual identity politics have taken over denominations like the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) recognize in the language of “gay Christian” an identity label of the sort that will lead inexorably to their own hitherto faithful churches capitulating to the LGBT agenda in the name of compassion and tolerance.
Leithart also suggests that we do not need to restore the social hierarchies of traditional society in order to stabilize personal identities, but that “Christians should work out identity within a theological and ecclesial frame.” The first half of this statement may be true in a narrow sense, since there can be no unringing the bell of modernity, no atavistic return to the premodern sexual situation. But I can see no reason to hope that godly sexual identity can be maintained without something like traditional society. Social institutions (church, family, schools etc) are necessary as the context within which Biblical sexuality is both possible and can flourish. The Bible does not ignore these structures. It works through them. And it is precisely because of God’s concern for these structures (“they are ruining whole households”; “a little leaven leavens the whole lump;” “whoso defiles the temple of God, him will God destroy”) that the Bible prescribes such strict intolerance of sexual immorality. Leithart is correct that “our identity is mediated through the recognition of the community of the baptized, who are commanded to receive all those whom God has received.” I would add that the Church is also commanded to put out the sexually immoral, and (for consistency’s sake) all the other things in Paul’s vice lists. This is, I submit, a large part of what it will mean to “work out identity within a theological and ecclesial frame.”
Working all this out will involve a great struggle. The “ecclesial frame” is itself contested because it is necessarily populated by expressive individuals and because the church is still an important enough institution to attract the attention of the partisans of all-too-politicized sexual identity. They have captured many of the institutions of the West, and churches like the PCA, the ACNA, the SBC, and Christian schools and universities are their next targets.[11] There have been many casualties already, and there will be more. I have seen many faithful Christian parents suffer the grief and horror of seeing their own children turn away from the faith to sexual perversion.
Providing the conditions for healthy, righteous, and normative Christian manhood and womanhood will necessitate a return to Biblical stigma. It will mean telling the advocates of perverted sexual identities that no matter what they say, they are not Christians and that they are not welcome at the Lord’s Table until they repent. Note that it is not enough to expel the sexually active and unrepentant. There must be an unambiguous condemnation of sexual identitarianism as a heresy. Only in this way can the Church function as a society that fosters and reinforces Christians’ sexual identity as men and women made for each other. Only in this way can the Church be a temple fit for God to dwell therein.
Matthew Colvin is a presbyter in the Reformed Episcopal Church. From 2012-2017, he served as a missionary teaching ministerial students in the Philippines and Indonesia. He holds a PhD in ancient Greek literature from Cornell University (2004). He lives on Vancouver Island.
[1] Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (New York: Penguin, 1941), 208.
[2] West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 210.
[3] “An industrial society cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs…Relentlessly, economic institutions transform the two culturally embedded genders into something new, into economic neuters distinguished by nothing more than their disembedded sex.” Ivan Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 9-13.
[4] My friend Joseph Minich puts it well: “One of the challenges of anyone that is trying to understand how nature is ‘normative’ is that it is nevertheless always inflected through custom. And so the natural ordering toward sex is consistent with all sorts of ‘first marriage’ practices, some of which might ‘honor’ the original [sc. natural] drive in all that it is meant to accomplish, and some of which might be in tension with the original drive and all it is meant to accomplish.” (Personal communication, May 21, 2021)
[5] This is one of the reasons why there is such tension between Anglican bishops from provinces in Africa and the ACNA as it grapples with the strife and friction that comes with addressing sexual identity in modern North America.
[6] Scruton, “Bring Back Stigma” City Journal, Autumn 2000, available online at https://www.city-journal.org/html/bring-back-stigma-11807.html
[7] Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 345. Sanders’ entire survey of the 2nd Temple Jewish attitude toward homosexuality (341-373) is very valuable. Although Sanders himself sees nothing wrong with homosexuality, he recognizes that Paul condemns it, and he provides the texts of Philo, Josephus, Wisdom of Solomon, Sibylline Oracles, and the Letter of Aristeas to show that Paul’s view was orthodox within 2nd Temple Judaism.
[8] Though to be sure, there will be occasions when individuals experience them this way. Anyone who reads Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in sympathy with Roger Chillingworth is deliberately misreading it.
[9] Daube, “Pauline Contributions to a Pluralistic Culture: Re-Creation and Beyond” in New Testament Judaism: Collected Works of David Daube Volume Two (Berkeley: The Robbins Collection, 2000), 538.
[10] Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Volume 1, Book I, §3.
[11] Witness the recent lawsuit against Trinity Western University in BC, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the law society was within its rights to refuse to recognize degrees from a Christian school that has a code of sexual ethics prohibiting same-sex sexual relationships.
An Architectural Analogy
The natural givenness of the sexes and the resulting construction of society in pretechnological eras was fairly stable. It was like a stone wall of cyclopean masonry—think of Mycenae or Machu Picchu—in which the force of gravity works upon the mass of each stone, and the stones are fitted together in such a way that their forces and counter-forces produce a stable unity that both protects the integrity of each stone in itself, and unites them together into a larger edifice that is strong and accomplishes the aims for which it was built.
Unfortunately, aims change. Think now of the stones of a Gothic cathedral. No longer are the stones behaving quite so stonishly. They are shaped into soaring piers, fan vaults and the tracery of rose windows. Unlike the stones of Mycenae, packed together in thick, sturdy cyclopean walls, the stones of Chartres are interrupted to make room for acres of stained glass. And because the walls are so preposterously thin and tall, the forces of gravity, far from being productive of their strength and unity, have become an enemy to their integrity: they would collapse if they were not propped up by elaborate system of flying buttresses.
It is a beautiful accomplishment, no doubt: most of us would prefer Salisbury Cathedral to Stonehenge. But it is a tour de force. We gasp in astonishment that stone, which by nature seeks a downward place in the Aristotelian cosmos, has been made to soar so high and perform such feats under the hands of architects and masons.
If Mycenae or Stonehenge is a metaphor for societies that work with the nature of stones, a Gothic cathedral is modern technological society. It presses the sexes into new configurations and functions. It produces egalitarianism and the fungibility of the sexes. We may think, with certain Marxists, agrarians, and traditionalists, that this is a bad thing. Or we may think, with other Marxists, feminists, and most of modern academia, that it is a good thing. But what we cannot deny is that it is a new and unnatural thing. It involves using stones in ways that stretch the limits of their natural constitution. And the result has been a change in social plausibility structures, the decentering of the natural family, the removal of stigma from many things that had been forbidden before, and, to crown all, the newfound social acceptability of new sexual identities such as homosexuality and transgenderism.
Another way of saying all this is that it is only under technological society that anyone has ever needed to do the work of constructing a sexual identity. As Jim Pocta points out in his contribution to this conversation, one’s identity as a man or woman was simply given in all previous ages. Even if one was not personally called or capable of marriage or parenthood, one’s sex was nonetheless given and comprehensible within that larger social normativity.
Before World War II, Rebecca West visited the Balkans and wrote a book about her travels, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. In it, she reflects on three men whom she observed in the town of Korchula:
They were all three beautiful, with thick, straight, fair hair and bronze skins and high cheekbones pulling the flesh up from their large mouths, with broad chests and long legs springing from arched feet. These were men, they could beget children on women, they could shape certain kinds of materials for purposes that made them masters of their worlds. I thought of two kinds of men that the West produces: the cityish kind who wears spectacles without shame, as if they were the sign of quality and not a defect, who is overweight and puffy, who can drive a car but knows no other mastery over material, who presses buttons and turns switches without comprehending the result, who makes money when the market goes up and loses it when the market goes down; the high-nosed young man, who is somebody’s secretary or is in the Foreign Office, who has a peevishly amusing voice and is very delicate, who knows a great deal but far from all there is to be known about French pictures.[1]
Mastery of material. Begetting children on women. Shaping things for purposes. Notice how West’s epitome of masculinity comports with the male body’s propensities and abilities in ways that incentivize, fulfill, and glorify them. By contrast, West’s “men of the West” (no Numenoreans, they!) are products of a culture that incentivizes, produces, and even perversely glorifies things that she considers “defects.”
The same phenomenon can be seen in the case of women. In the same chapter, shortly after her description of the three young men of Korchula, West considers a Korchulan noblewoman, a relative of one of the three:
She said, “It’s too quiet. I liked it when there were children about, laughing, and then crying, and then laughing again. That’s how it ought to be in a house.” She spoke with complete confidence, as one who expresses an opinion held by all the world. A house with children is better than a house without children. That she assumed to be an axiom, on that she had founded all her life and pride. It was as if she were a child herself, a fragile child who had escaped death by a miracle and was boasting of its invulnerability to all ills. Her life had for the most part been secure because in her world men had been proud to be fathers, and had marvelled gratefully at women for being fine-wrought enough to make the begetting of children an excitement, and sturdy enough to bear them and rear them, and had thought of the mother of many children as the female equivalent of a rich man. Because these masculine attitudes had favoured her feminine activities, her unbroken pride was lovely as the trumpet of a lily. It might have been different for her if she had been born into a society where men have either lost their desire for children, or are prevented from gratifying it by poverty or the fear of war. There she would have been half hated, and perhaps more than half, for her sex. Her womb, which here was her talisman, would have been a source of danger, which might even strike at the very root of her primal value, and one day make her husband feel that the delight he had known with her was not worth the price he must pay for it.[2]
As with the men, so with the women, the characteristic actions and callings of the sexes are in concord with the nature of the sexed body: “Her womb was her talisman.” “I liked it when there were children about.”
West wrote in 1936. What would she think now of the state of womanhood in Western society, with the American fertility rate at 1.71 children per woman as of 2019? West looks at Korchulan society as an outsider, a Westerner whose own society is one in which the forces of modernity have already made motherhood more difficult and manliness almost gelded. Writing in 1936, West views Korchula’s impending loss of these things with poignant pity, knowing that the day will come when modern industrial society will overwhelm even these men and women with its unnatural forces of attentuation and compulsion. Indeed, West adds, the sons of the proud Korchulan matriarch, though descended from ships’ captains, were already employed by great steamship lines.
As Alastair notes in his initial piece for this conversation, and as Ivan Illich has explained at more length, technological society requires sexual egalitarianism.[3] And egalitarianism makes natural sexual identity extremely difficult: the natural inclinations and functions of male and female minds and bodies are at odds with technological society’s norms. Birth control pills, ADHD medications, and Viagra must be prescribed. Fertility must be suppressed, “toxic masculinity” chastised. The effects of technological society on the body must be counteracted with artificial and otherwise pointless physical exercise.
It is not that masculinity and femininity are merely social constructions, or that they are merely performative — as though all would be well if women would just have babies and men would take up woodworking. But masculinity and feminity are grounded in realities created by God, and those created realities of manhood and womanhood do involve certain distinctive activities. An orca may still be an orca in captivity, but its dorsal fin will collapse and it will behave in pathological ways, because it was not made by God to swim laps around a tiny pool at SeaWorld. So too the sexes in technological modernity.[4]
A caveat is in order here: I am not pining for a return to pretechnological, preindustrial society. There are very many benefits to life in modernity, and even if we judged, as I do not, that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits, there is in any case no unringing the bell. But any way forward must proceed from an understanding of why sexual identity is so difficult and complicated in our day, and must reckon with the givenness of human bodies and the natures of the two sexes.
How do stones stand?
Modern society, then, is using human stones to build structures that work against the natural constitution of men and women. Worse, modernity often even denigrates things that the Bible considers good: having many children (“breeder”), chastity for men and women (“The 40-year-old Virgin”), feminine domesticity (“Desperate Housewives”), and natural marriage reflecting God’s design in creation (“heteronormativity”). In no prior age of the church has there been such a thing as a “sexual identity.” Such a thing has only emerged because the cultural pressures that would normally help us inhabit our sexed bodies and live male or female lives have been stripped away. Without these forces, men and women are like astronauts whose organs are malfunctioning in zero gravity, or teetering blocks in a game of Jenga rather than stones securely fitted into a stable and sturdy wall.
Alastair Roberts’ initial article in this conversation discusses the phenomenology of sexual identity. I heartily echo his observation of the “gender neutralization” of the spaces and communities of Western society. He also rightly observes that most people do not have a “sexual identity” in the same sense as members of the “LGBT community,” but rather thave a “strong sense of being men or women and of being in some sort of a charged relationship with the other sex.” I submit that we should see “sexual identity” as an attempt to fill the void left by a damaged sense of one’s natural sex. It can only occur within a modern technological society in which the various forces that support a healthy sexuality have become attenuated or lost.[5]
One of the most significant forces that has been lost is the inner regulation of sexual behavior by the sense of shame and guilt, which are the internalization of the moral judgments of others. In an important article, “Bring Back Stigma,” Roger Scruton has discussed the way shame has been removed from our societies, leaving the public sphere regulated by naked law, and the private sphere unregulated entirely. Scruton makes the case that stigma and taboo are just how sexual morality is internalized and enforced upon most people:
“By imbuing sexual feelings with psychological sanctions, traditional societies ensured that they were controlled by the person who feels them. As a result, sexual feelings were integrated into moral character, not governed from outside by laws and regulations, but from inside by the will...Take this inner control away, and what was previously a source of social cohesion becomes the cause of social decay.”[6]
When these psychological sanctions are removed, or when they are replaced with their opposites (so that biblical sexual identity is devalued or denigrated, while alternative sexual identities are celebrated), the result is social dissolution. Without any stigma attaching to sexual acts and inclinations that were once shameful, and that do not produce a one-flesh union of man and woman, there is no longer any means by which the human sexual impulse can be made to produce lasting family bonds. Sex is severed from reproduction, from marital commitment, from the march of generations.
Stigma, so important for effecting the internalization of sexual norms in the conscience of the individual, is now something that the church no longer feels it can wield. Seven years ago, Thabiti Anyabwile suggested that the gag reflex that is “triggered by an accurate description of homosexual behavior will be the beginning of the recovery of moral sense and sensibility when it comes to the so-called “gay marriage” debate. He was, of course, wrong, though not for the reasons his critics, such as Carl Trueman and Ron Belgau, said he was wrong. The successful destigmatization of homosexual acts was in fact accomplished by (1) presenting homosexuality to the public as a matter of identity instead of acts, and (2) by stigmatizing stigma, using the now well-known “-phobia” slur. A mere two years after Anyabwile’s article, gay marriage became legal in all 50 states. A few years later, we find that denominations like the PCA and the ACNA have vocal fifth columns of “side B” advocates who see it as a matter of empathetic care to use the language of “gay Christians” and “sexual identity,” even if they do not affirm homosexual sex acts. It is no longer even socially acceptable to express abhorrence at homosexuality. Even in “non-affirming” denominations, disapproval of homosexuality is expressed exclusively in what Alastair Roberts has noted are medical and neutral language. Words like “perversion,” “sodomy,” and “abomination” are not used. What the Bible stigmatizes, modern pastors do not dare to speak ill of. The result is that instead of being a shameful perversion practiced in secret (“the love that dare not speak its name”), homosexuality is now a live option that every Western child growing up must weigh as a mere matter of “figuring out” his sexual identity, since that is no longer a given: “Am I, perhaps, gay?” If the children of Christian parents are to remain chaste and honor God in the matter of their sexual identity, it will now have to be because they make a conscious choice to do so. For those who have a complicated, fraught, or abusive relationship with parents or other authority figures, the emotional and psychological costs of conforming to what Alastair Roberts calls the “scripts” of Biblical sexual identity are high. Personal choice in an “affirming” society is a much more fragile basis for faithful sexual identity than the church has ever had to rely on in any prior age of history.
Let us not forget that the norms of Biblical sexual morality that prevailed in the West until recently were hard won from the surrounding immorality of the Ancient Near East, and guarded from the equally immoral norms of the Greco-Roman culture into which the NT was written. How was sexual identity formed and guarded in the Bible? By fierce and powerful stigma. Sexual immorality defiles the temple of God. In Numbers 25, the elders of Israel were commanded to execute every man of Israel who had been enticed into the worship of Baal by committing sexual immorality (zenuth, LXX ἐκπορνεῦσαι) with the daughters of Moab. In the NT, the judicial death penalty may not be in force, but the severity of the offence is no less: the risen Christ threatens to destroy with death those who teach his servants to commit sexual immorality (Rev. 2:20-23). The apostle Paul does not tarry with half-measures: he urges the church at Corinth to “not to keep company with the sexually immoral (πόρνοι)” (1 Cor. 5:9) and to “put away from among yourselves the wicked person (τὸν πονερόν)” who has his father’s wife (1 Cor. 5:13).
The Torah also extirpated homosexuality from Israel, so that it was unheard of among Jews. It did so by instituting the (never historically inflicted) death penalty against men who have sex with men and by including sodomy in Leviticus 20’s of prohibitions of extraordinary sins like child sacrifice, incest, man-on-animal bestiality, woman-on-animal bestiality. In Leviticus 18, another prohibition of homosexual sex is sandwiched between prohibitions of child sacrifice and bestiality. These chapters show that sodomy was not on the level of eating non-kosher food or wearing mixed fabrics. It was considered one of the most extraordinary sexual sins in ancient Israel. The New Testament does not alter this condemnation of same-sex acts. Rather, it underscores it by derogatory language like “dogs,” “sexually immoral, adulterers, effeminate ones, those who lie with men” (πόρνοι, μοιχοί, μαλακοί, ἀρσενοκοῖται, 1 Corinthians 6:9) and the judgment that such persons are “unrighteous.” Paul includes homosexuality in his vice-lists because it was notoriously and uncontroversially sinful. As E.P. Sanders has noted, “we must assume that Paul did not actually face a case [of homosexuality] in one of his congregations; if he had, we would hear a lot more about it.”[7] It is something Gentiles do, not Jews. Christianity preserved the Old Testament’s sexual morality.
Modern LGBT mythology would have it that whenever homosexuality is criminalized and stigmatized in a society, there is always some fixed proportion of the population who are nonetheless attracted to the same sex, and experience the suppression of homosexuality in law and society as oppression, which causes them to suffer mental anguish and commit suicide—harms which should be laid at the feet of “heteronormativity” and “homophobia.” Passing over whether this argument is legitimate for our day, I note that it cannot legitimately be retrojected into the Bible. There is no evidence of closeted gay Israelites in antiquity. Ancient Israel was not a society of expressive individualism. Israelites were not in quest of their sexual identity. The conditions of modern homosexuality, enabled by technology and the de-gendering of society, had not yet arisen.
I have chosen homosexuality as one instance of sexual identity. I might just as easily have chosen the Bible’s valorization of domesticity for women, or the idea that only men should serve in the profession of arms. The point is that in the early Church and ancient Israel, believers had manhood and womanhood handed to them, complete with expectations, norms, blessings, and sanctions that comported with their sexed bodies. Self-understanding as men and women and righteous sexual behavior were reinforced by social stigma and honor, as they have been throughout history: betrothal, dowries, bride-prices, wedding ceremonies, bills of divorce, and public recognition of marital status are among the legal ordinances that channeled the sexual impulse in ways that made for the sexual well-being of Israelites. Such social reinforcements are not mere cruelty or persecution.[8] Rather, they are the natural and needed supports for sexual well-being, both of individuals and of a culture. They have all been greatly attenuated or abolished in our day.
There are two main consequences of the recognition that sexual identity is largely produced by social reinforcement. First, we cannot view the construction of sexual identity as a matter that Christians also can take in hand as a project to be done in the same way as the construction of a lesbian or transgender identity—as though sexual identity were like music or carpentry, just another task to be done, but which Christians can do Christianly. The task is rather to attempt to rebuild an ecclesial society that can hold in place the stones that God is building into His temple, so that men and women are reinforced and supported in their self-understanding as men and women, and are not precipitated on the fruitless and harmful quest to construct a sexual identity.
Second, because sexual identity is formed and reinforced socially, the Church needs to change the way it is approaching the question. It will not do to counter various immoral sexual identities with “identity in Christ.” Such “identity in Christ” remains merely notional unless it is given concrete social form. Even if the ACNA casts you out, “the Episcopal Church welcomes you.” The choice to be a churchgoer, or a traditionalist, or to believe that the Bible is the Word of God — these also are now matters of bespoke identity-construction, performative acts of expressive individualism, no less than marching in a Pride parade or getting body piercings.
I also do not have much confidence in Christian leaders’ ability to shepherd confused sexual identitarians who are struggling to figure out their own identity. We have a good three decades of experience with Christian leaders’ brittle and artificial solutions to the problems that modernity poses to the sexes, and the results cannot be called an unqualified success. We have the Quiverfull movement, the Biblical Courtship movement, the “women must not wear trousers” movement, etc. What they all have in common is that they are reactions against the abolition of organic norms maintained by society. In place of those organic norms, these movements impose ossified and performative legal requirements. The results are predictable. If this Theopolis Conversation doesn’t satisfy you about sexual identity, you might turn to Shannon Bonne, the ex-wife of Josh “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” Harris, who is penning a musical about “themes like identity, authenticity, gender roles and power in the conservative church.”
No one has the wisdom to guide others on these issues, because they have never been matters of guidance by a guru. They have always been shaped by society, and now society threatens Christian sexual identity. The fragility of legalistic impositions – courtship culture, modesty requirements, rules about women doing this or that (even the pastorate), the unhealthy fascination with performative masculinity – should be a salutary warning about the likelihood of the church’s success in guiding people to form sexual identities. I am not optimistic.
Can We Rebuild?
This is not a wonderful new opportunity. It is a crisis fraught with peril. Has the church ever faced a similar crisis? The closest thing that comes to my mind is the situation of the Corinthian church. When faced with Corinthians vaunting themselves upon their sexual freedom “in Christ,” Paul does not gently correct them or sooth them with therapeutic platitudes and assurances that he has heard their lived experience and understands the suffering of incestuously-oriented Christians under the harsh expectation of Christian purity culture. He excoriates the Corinthians for being “puffed up” (πεφυσιωμένοι ἐστέ, 1 Cor. 5:2) and tells them that they ought rather to mourn. This rebuke is actually a thorough repudiation of their assumptions about identity and sex. As David Daube puts it, “There is all the difference between being wicked—cheating, fornicating—and elevating what is normally considered wicked into a fine thing.”[9] Daube argues, persuasively in my view, that the Corinthians considered the incestuous relationship between a man and his father’s wife to be a badge of their liberty as new creations in Christ. In other words, it was a matter of their identity, even if not in exactly the same way as LGBT identity in our day. Yet the apostle Paul does not accomodate himself to the preferred identifiers or language of sexually immoral Christians. He has no patience at all for their incestuous Pride. What they view as a mark of their special identity, Paul views as “such πορνεῖα as is not even named among the Gentiles,” a stinging condemnation. He urges that the sexually immoral man be put out of the church. The stark finality of this amputation from the body of Christ is sometimes concealed by mistranslation of 1 Corinthians 5:5. For instance, the ESV: “you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord,” as though Paul hoped that the immoral man might yet make it into heaven, at the cost of physical chastisement. This is all quite alien to the context, for there is nothing about physical punishment. More importantly, the word “his” should not be supplied. Paul is contrasting the Spirit with the flesh, not as the soul and body of an individual man, but as the righteous and wicked members of the Corinthian church. His concern is that the cancer of sexual immorality not be allowed to spread: “Purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened.” (1 Cor. 5:7) There is nothing here about hoping for the salvation of the soul of the sexually immoral man. Paul may well hope for his conversion, but that is not his concern in 1 Corinthians 5. His concern is to prevent the church from being corrupted by sexual immorality.
Herman Bavinck offers some thoughts on how sexual immorality corrupts a human life. He says that procreation, conception, and birth are all carefully guarded by shame in the Bible, and this shame is enforced by the purification laws of the Old Testament. When we bring these matters out onto the stage, they become obscene (ob-scaena) and result in impurity in the soul: “This impurity begins with thoughts, but it also becomes a favored topic of discussion (among children, young men, and young women). It is fed and nurtured by the imagination, which turns abstract thought into images that are graphic, embodied, and living.”[10] Our society is radically pornographic, and that means that the sexual consciousness of many Christians has been warped. The stones with which God builds our families, churches, and other institutions are now, more than in past ages, impure stones. Their ability to fit together with other stones in a strong and permanent structure has been impaired.
In his contribution to this conversation, Peter Leithart correctly identifies sexual identity as a political category in our day. The degree to which sexual identity is political can hardly be overstated. And this politicization is another reason why sexual identitarianism is a threat to the church. This is why there is such tension over “side B” and Revoice and “gay Christians” in denominations like the PCA and ACNA. Many of those who have fled the mainline as sexual identity politics have taken over denominations like the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) recognize in the language of “gay Christian” an identity label of the sort that will lead inexorably to their own hitherto faithful churches capitulating to the LGBT agenda in the name of compassion and tolerance.
Leithart also suggests that we do not need to restore the social hierarchies of traditional society in order to stabilize personal identities, but that “Christians should work out identity within a theological and ecclesial frame.” The first half of this statement may be true in a narrow sense, since there can be no unringing the bell of modernity, no atavistic return to the premodern sexual situation. But I can see no reason to hope that godly sexual identity can be maintained without something like traditional society. Social institutions (church, family, schools etc) are necessary as the context within which Biblical sexuality is both possible and can flourish. The Bible does not ignore these structures. It works through them. And it is precisely because of God’s concern for these structures (“they are ruining whole households”; “a little leaven leavens the whole lump;” “whoso defiles the temple of God, him will God destroy”) that the Bible prescribes such strict intolerance of sexual immorality. Leithart is correct that “our identity is mediated through the recognition of the community of the baptized, who are commanded to receive all those whom God has received.” I would add that the Church is also commanded to put out the sexually immoral, and (for consistency’s sake) all the other things in Paul’s vice lists. This is, I submit, a large part of what it will mean to “work out identity within a theological and ecclesial frame.”
Working all this out will involve a great struggle. The “ecclesial frame” is itself contested because it is necessarily populated by expressive individuals and because the church is still an important enough institution to attract the attention of the partisans of all-too-politicized sexual identity. They have captured many of the institutions of the West, and churches like the PCA, the ACNA, the SBC, and Christian schools and universities are their next targets.[11] There have been many casualties already, and there will be more. I have seen many faithful Christian parents suffer the grief and horror of seeing their own children turn away from the faith to sexual perversion.
Providing the conditions for healthy, righteous, and normative Christian manhood and womanhood will necessitate a return to Biblical stigma. It will mean telling the advocates of perverted sexual identities that no matter what they say, they are not Christians and that they are not welcome at the Lord’s Table until they repent. Note that it is not enough to expel the sexually active and unrepentant. There must be an unambiguous condemnation of sexual identitarianism as a heresy. Only in this way can the Church function as a society that fosters and reinforces Christians’ sexual identity as men and women made for each other. Only in this way can the Church be a temple fit for God to dwell therein.
Matthew Colvin is a presbyter in the Reformed Episcopal Church. From 2012-2017, he served as a missionary teaching ministerial students in the Philippines and Indonesia. He holds a PhD in ancient Greek literature from Cornell University (2004). He lives on Vancouver Island.
[1] Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (New York: Penguin, 1941), 208.
[2] West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 210.
[3] “An industrial society cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs...Relentlessly, economic institutions transform the two culturally embedded genders into something new, into economic neuters distinguished by nothing more than their disembedded sex.” Ivan Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 9-13.
[4] My friend Joseph Minich puts it well: “One of the challenges of anyone that is trying to understand how nature is ‘normative’ is that it is nevertheless always inflected through custom. And so the natural ordering toward sex is consistent with all sorts of ‘first marriage’ practices, some of which might ‘honor’ the original [sc. natural] drive in all that it is meant to accomplish, and some of which might be in tension with the original drive and all it is meant to accomplish.” (Personal communication, May 21, 2021)
[5] This is one of the reasons why there is such tension between Anglican bishops from provinces in Africa and the ACNA as it grapples with the strife and friction that comes with addressing sexual identity in modern North America.
[6] Scruton, “Bring Back Stigma” City Journal, Autumn 2000, available online at https://www.city-journal.org/html/bring-back-stigma-11807.html
[7] Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 345. Sanders’ entire survey of the 2nd Temple Jewish attitude toward homosexuality (341-373) is very valuable. Although Sanders himself sees nothing wrong with homosexuality, he recognizes that Paul condemns it, and he provides the texts of Philo, Josephus, Wisdom of Solomon, Sibylline Oracles, and the Letter of Aristeas to show that Paul’s view was orthodox within 2nd Temple Judaism.
[8] Though to be sure, there will be occasions when individuals experience them this way. Anyone who reads Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in sympathy with Roger Chillingworth is deliberately misreading it.
[9] Daube, “Pauline Contributions to a Pluralistic Culture: Re-Creation and Beyond” in New Testament Judaism: Collected Works of David Daube Volume Two (Berkeley: The Robbins Collection, 2000), 538.
[10] Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Volume 1, Book I, §3.
[11] Witness the recent lawsuit against Trinity Western University in BC, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the law society was within its rights to refuse to recognize degrees from a Christian school that has a code of sexual ethics prohibiting same-sex sexual relationships.
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