We continue in Chapter 4 "Loveless Sex is Not Empowering" from Louise Perry's book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

In last week's post, we noted Perry's argument that the "liberation" of the sexual revolution largely favors men, who typically score higher on measures of sociosexuality (i.e., an openness to sex with strangers, desiring multiple sexual partners, and an interest in uncommitted sex). By "favors men" Perry means that a woman's natural desire for sex to be meaningful--connected to intimacy and love--has to be suppressed in order to meet the standards of hook-up culture, where sex is "just sex," devoid of any intimate, loving connection.

In this world, should a young woman ever develop "feelings" about her sexual partner, should she get emotionally "attached" or--horror of horrors--fall in love, well, that young lady is branded as clingy, needy, and "crazy." The mandate is clear: young women need to numb their feelings if they want to participate in the current sexual marketplace.

In fact, as Perry goes on to describe, this is precisely the sort of sexual advice that young women are receiving from magazines, sex guides, and advice columns. Perry observes:

A more depressing pop-feminist genre comes at the sociosexuality gap from a different angle, advising women to work on overcoming their perfectly normal and healthy preference for intimacy and commitment in sexual relationships. Guides with titles such as 'Here's what to do if you start "catching feelings"', 'How to bio-hack your brain to have sex without getting emotionally attached' and 'How to have casual sex without getting emotionally attached' advise readers to, for instance, avoid making eye contact with their partners during sex, in an effort to avoid 'making an intimate connection'. Readers are also advised to take cocaine or methamphetamines before sex to dull the dopamine response, but to avoid alcohol, since for women (but, tellingly, not men) this seems to increase 'the likelihood they will bond prematurely'. All sorts of innovative methods of dissociation are advised, for example: 'Another way to prevent the intimate association between your fuck buddy and the heightened activity in your brain's reward center is to consciously focus your thoughts on another person during sex.' These guides are all carefully phrased to present the problem as gender-neutral, but research on male and female attitudes toward casual sex, combined with what we know about the sociosexuality gap, makes clear that what is really happening here is that it is overwhelmingly women who are being advised to emotionally cripple themselves in order to gratify men. 

Research suggests that women possess higher levels of the hormone oxytocin than men, the hormone that gained its first recognition as "the maternal hormone," given its role in childbirth and breastfeeding, but is now more broadly called "the love hormone" related its role in facilitating intimacy, bonding, emotional connection, affection and trust in both men and women. So when a sex guide describes how to "bio-hack your brain" to enjoy casual sex, that's a legit description. The sexual revolution is asking us, mainly women, to behave in ways that cut across our embodiment, asking us to sever connections with the hormonal systems that have evolved (via evolution, the gift of God, or both at the same time) to promote intimacy, trust, and love in sexual relations. 

To be clear, I'm not rushing here, as a Christian, to trumpet the victory of the traditional Christian sexual ethic, which prioritizes love over orgasm, over the sexual revolution. My question here comes from being a psychologist. Specifically, what are the physical and mental health consequences of a sexual culture where the hormonally-based longings of body and soul are consistently suppressed and mortified? This can't be a recipe for mental and physical health.

Does that mean that sex needs to be restricted to marriage? Listen, I'll let you make your own call about that. I'm not a culture warrior. I want to traffic more in wisdom than moral absolutes. My point here is simply to note that the longing to connect sex with love isn't the product of evangelical purity culture. The desire to connect sex to love comes from your body. And I think we should listen to the wisdom of the body. 

When a young woman falls in love with her sexual partner, she's not crazy. And a culture that calls her crazy and trains her to "bio-hack" her brain during sex is deeply broken.

Currently, what is the status of nation states in relation to the kingship of Jesus Christ?

As I shared in the last post, I read the Bible as saying that the powers are currently in a state of rebellion. This rebellion ends at the end of history, when Christ destroys all power, dominion and rule (1 Cor. 15.24). In the meantime, the church bears witness to the rebellion of the powers as it fulfills its prophetic role of indictment. 

And yet, in describing the powers as being in a state of rebellion, the temptation here, a temptation I've succumbed to in the past, is to view the powers as evil. The difficulty with that view concerns the positive things Paul has to say about nation states. The most famous passage to consider is this:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. (Romans 13.1-7)

Some important things are said here that need to be taken into account in any attempt at a political theology. The powers--"governing authorities"--have their authority from God, for "there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God." Governing authorities are "God's servant for your good." This service is mainly rendered, at least in this text, as administering justice, serving as "an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer." Because of this Christians are to "be subject" to the governing authorities, giving them due honor and paying taxes.

A text like this precludes seeing the powers as evil. Clearly, we have to see the powers as established by God and providing some useful function. The way I thread the needle here is to view the powers as fallen, rather than evil. 

Following the arguments of many other political theologians, the exercise of "dominion," what I take Paul to mean by "authority" in Romans 13, involves creating structures that enable flourishing. "Governing authorities" provide such structures. To be sure, there are unjust, oppressive and evil authorities. But authority is given by God as a creational good that, by and large, has kept human cultures from descending into chaos and violence. Insofar as authorities serve in this function, they deserve our respect and support. 

For example, as I've written about before, perhaps the greatest source of suffering and evil in the world, and world historically, are failed states. Functional states, by contrast, promote and protect human flourishing and life. This is what I think Paul is describing in Romans 13. Even Rome, as wicked as it was, was doing some good.

And yet, to return to my prior post, the same Rome being described in Romans 13 is the same Rome being described as Babylon in the book of Revelation. A political vision of the powers has to keep this dialectic in view. Rome is both "God's servant" and the "demon-haunted city" that stands under the judgment of God and will face its eventual destruction by God. We have to hold Revelation 18 and Romans 13 in tension. For me, the best way to articulate this duality is to see Rome, along with any nation state, as not evil but fallen. As a contemporary example, both of these statements can be true:

1. America is an oppressive and wicked nation. (America is fallen.)
2. America provides more justice, safety, liberty, and prosperity than many other nations, making it significantly more attractive to live here than elsewhere. (America is more effective as being "God's servant for our good" compared to other nation states.)

Liberals like to focus on #1. Conservatives, #2. But in the biblical imagination, both #1 and #2 are true.

Last spring, my friend and colleague Brad East posted some reflections and questions in response to a post of mine regarding Christian involvement in politics.

If you read Brad's post, he asks a lot of very good questions prompted by my post. In that post I tried to suggest that Christians emotionally disengage from politics while remaining democratically involved. I'd like Christians to think about politics less ideologically and more pragmatically, seeing politics as a tool of limited use, a tool we don't place a lot of confidence in but a tool that can be put to good use. Brad thinks that this "engaged with low expectations" approach isn't realistic. You're either in, or you're out. If you're engaged you have to care, and if you care you're going to be emotionally invested. 

Brad also asked a lot of other questions about the proper Christian attitude toward the state. One question he asked that caught my attention was "What if they ask?" That is to say, if a nation, party or political leader asked the church what to do, what sort of answer should the church have ready? 

I don't know if I have fully worked out a comprehensive set of answers for all of Brad's questions, but his post has had me thinking over many months. I'm going to gather here in this series some of my reflections on political theology, how the church relates to "the powers" (to used a biblical phrase) and how that relationship affects political engagement. This is a fraught business because, as I mentioned recently, the New Testament was written in a very different political context from ours, addressed to powerless people living in colonial outposts of an Imperial Empire. The early Christians had little hope, prospect or expectation that they could effect political change. They were living as subjects of Rome, "the Eternal City." That there would come a day where Christians would be politically enfranchised citizens in a democracy wasn't on the horizon. So we have little in the pages of Scripture giving us guidance in how to use our personal and collective votes.

Given that situation, political theologians (and just normal people sitting in the pews) weave together a tapestry from the threads of Scripture to describe a vision of contemporary political engagement. Since, as I've said, we're working with primary material that had not envisioned modern political realities, these attempts are diverse and contentious. There's no consensus on how the church should use its votes, if at all. I expect my musings here will be just as tenuous and contentious. Still, because of Brad's post, I wanted to get some of my thoughts in order. Joining me, you might clarify your own views, in either agreement or disagreement.

[Looking back over these posts today, having written them over three months ago, I'm not all that satisfied with what I've written. If there's a central, guiding idea to this series it's simply a profound skepticism about any political project purporting to be "Christian." And that any nostalgia for a lost "Christendom" is borderline delusional, and a desire for a "Christian nation" deeply problematic, and most likely a Trojan Horse for evil and wickedness. If the church is water and the state is dirt, the mixture will always be mud. This is not to say, as this series will argue, that Christians should keep their hands clean. Just that getting in the mud will muddy--See what I did there?--the vision of Christ. Christian political theologians need to be theologians of the mud. If you're a Christian political theologian not centering the mud--the occlusion of Christ by the state--you are trafficking in either nostalgia or utopianism, and likely both at the same time. These thinkers and writers are the political theological equivalent of a Hallmark movie. To these sentimentalists I say: More mud, please.]

 To start, let me set out the first and most fundamental conviction of my political theology. It is this: 

The primary relationship of the church to the state is prophetic criticism. 

Let me draw your attention to a few things.

Notice I didn't say "prophetic contrast." I said "prophetic criticism." The reason for this distinction is that the Yoder-Hauerwas vision of the church as "counter-polis" to the state, I think, has fallen on hard times. The church, by and large, is a mess. It's way too easy to describe the church in highly idealized terms as a "city set on a hill" as a counter-community to the state. To be clear, I do believe the church should embody and instantiate an alternative politics. But this attempt is fraught, ambiguous, and frankly, never really observed.   

So, the political role of the church isn't primarily to become a counter-community. Though that is always an aspiration given the collection of sinners on hand. The primary role is prophetic criticism and critique. As the steward of the gospel, the church declares the reign and kingdom of God and, given the fallenness of the Powers, this message is always delivered to the state and associated political powers as prophetic rebuke. This is the primary political task of the church, to declare the kingship of Lord Jesus and fallenness of the Powers. 

A sketch of the biblical warrant for this view is as follows. First: the political disaster of Israel's monarchy and how that monarchy was established via a failure of faith in YHWH. Relatedly, Israel's entire prophetic tradition points to how every human rule, in its fallenness, must be met by the prophetic voice. Simply, if the political rule of Israel was idolatrous and unjust, no purported "Christian nation" should expect any different outcome. To Brad's question--"What if they ask?"--the answer from Israel is: "They might ask, but no nation in history ever listened." I'll say it plainly: any vision of "Christendom" is utopian.  

Beyond the evidence of Israel's exile, that no human rule can escape the judgment of God, there is also the New Testament witness about the current rebellion of the powers to the reign of Christ:

Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. (1 Cor. 15.24-26)

Our current political situation is that Christ is at war with the rebellious powers. Every nation is currently crossing swords with Christ. Even self-proclaimed "Christian nations" are enemies of the Lamb, even when they have purported "Christian leaders" in charge. Thus, the primary political task of the church is to bear witness to this war, to make the rebellion of nation states salient and visible, and to proclaim the ultimate victory of the King of Kings. 

Pragmatically speaking, the first word a Christian has for his or her nation and political party is negative. Sustaining this prophetic negativity is the primary political activity of the church. 

The word of God always enters the world as a provocation. Some demon is always being confronted, uprooted, unsettled, or exorcised. A demon of shame, or a demon of hate. Since the word of God is liberating and emancipatory, some power of slavery is being challenged and overcome. And since we actively and idolatrously participate in this enslavement, even cling to it, the word of God is experienced as scandal and contradiction. The word of God gains its first hearing as a stone of stumbling, as prophetic interruption, where the old world is crucified to give birth to the new. 

"Staying Power" by Jeanne Murray Walker

In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International Convention of Atheists, 1929

Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside to the yard and question the sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this, and finally I say

all right, it is improbable, all right, there
is no God. And then as if I'm focusing
a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.
It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there

that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire
until I have to spend the afternoon dragging
the hose to put the smoldering thing out.
Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls,

tells me they've found melanoma,
complains that the hospital is cold, I say God.
God, I say as my heart turns inside out.
Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,

wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,
and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire
again, which—though they say it doesn't
exist—can send you straight to the burn unit.

Oh, we have only so many words to think with.
Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's
a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be.

You don't want to talk, so you pull out
the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up

and a voice you love whispers hello.

From "The Vision of of the Shepherds" portion of W.H. Auden's “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio": 

III

CHORUS OF ANGELS

Unto you a Child
A Son is given.
Praising, proclaiming
The Ingression of Love,
Earth's darkness invents
The blaze of Heaven,
And frigid silence
Mediates a song;
For great joy has filled
The narrow and the sad,
While the emphasis
Of the rough and big,
The abiding crag
And wandering wave,
Is on forgiveness:
Sing Glory to God
And good-will to men,
All, all, all of them.
Run to Bethlehem.

SHEPHERDS

Let us run to learn
How to love and run;
Let us run to Love.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

--W.H. Auden, "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio"

We're in Chapter 3 of Louise Perry's book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, a chapter entitled "Loveless Sex is Not Empowering." 

The argumentative lever Perry pulls in this chapter concerns the sexual psychologies of men and women regarding a trait psychologists call "sociosexuality." 

Sociosexuality is the degree to which a person is interested in causal, uncommitted sex. Persons high in sociosexuality are happy to have sex with strangers, desirous of having multiple different sexual partners across their lifespan, and are both interested in and willing to have sex without any intimate commitments. As Perry describes, men, across all cultures, score higher on measures of sociosexuality than do women. The obvious datapoint here is gender asymmetry we observe in the buying and selling of sex. By far, men are more willing to buy sex from a stranger.

Returning to a point made earlier in this series, evolutionary psychologists believe the gender differences we observe with sociosexuality are rooted in the particular adaptive challenges men and women faced in ancestral contexts, given their unique reproductive biologies. Evolving to meet these challenges, women acquired a sexual psychology biased toward monogamous commitment and investment. Men, by contrast, evolved a sexual psychology that favored sociosexuality, a willingness to have sex with as many different partners as opportunity provided.

For Perry, these gender differences in sociosexuality present a problem for hook-up culture. Specifically, hook-up culture favors those higher in sociosexuality. Which means that hook-up culture favors men over women. The sexual revolution is designed to serve the sexual interests of men. Here's Perry:

The heterosexual dating market has a problem, and it's not one that can be easily resolved. Male sexuality and female sexuality, at the population level, do not match. On average, men want casual sex more often than women do, and women want committed monogamy more often than men do. Hook-up culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex. Some women are quite happy to do this, but most women find it unpleasant, or even distressing. Thus hook-up culture is a solution to the sexuality mismatch that benefits some men at the expense of most women.

I propose a different solution, based on a fundamental feminist claim: unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration. I'm not willing to accept a sexual culture that puts pressure on people low in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly women) to meet the sexual demands of those high in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly men), particularly when sex carries so many more risks for women, in terms of violence and pregnancy. Hook-up culture is a terrible deal for women and yet has been presented by liberal feminism as a form of liberation. A truly feminist project would demand that, in the straight dating world, it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites. 

Stated sharply, the "liberation" of the sexual revolution is deeply patriarchal. 

As I concluded my talk to the High School students about issues related to penal substitutionary atonement, I took a few moments to widen the view.

I didn't have a lot of time left, but I wanted the students to at least have another category in mind when they think about salvation, a category that could collect all the positive things we talked about that salvation entailed. Salvation should be about sanctification, justice, social relationships, and breaking the power of sin in our lives. And most importantly, it should do all these things while not making God our problem. Gratitude, rather than fear, should be the emotional tone.

The category I gave the students was Passover. In the Old Testament the two main ways salvation was experienced that are carried over into the Christian imagination are the Day of Atonement and Passover. Penal substitutionary atonement mainly works with Day of Atonement images, the shedding of blood, the scapegoat, and the washing away of sins. Penal substitutionary atonement recasts theses images in a forensic metaphor. 

But the other way to think about salvation from the Old Testament is Passover. In this image we're enslaved to the power of sin, a power that wrecks our world, our relationships, and our well-being. Salvation, in this view, is God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, entering our world, relationships, and lives to set us free. We, more and more, participate in God's work to repair the world. The framework of Passover gathers up a lot of the things that penal substitutionary atonement leaves out or distorts. And most importantly, Passover imagery doesn't make God your problem. God is acting, rather, as liberator. No wrath or hell, only gracious, faithful power and love that effects our salvation.

A fourth distortion I pointed out to the senior Bible class concerning penal substitutionary atonement concerned the nature of sin.

Because penal substitutionary atonement works with a forensic, crime and punishment metaphor, salvation is framed as a judicial matter. Salvation is being declared "innocent" in a court of law. Sins are "forgiven" and we are set free from jail. 

Salvation surely is all that. But "having my slate wiped clean" is a narrow view of salvation.

I described it this way to the High School students. "Imagine," I said, "I wrote every sin you ever committed on a white board. And we can agree that we'd need a pretty big white board. We've got a lot of sins to write down. So we write them down. And then I say, 'Because of Jesus, your sins are forgiven. Your sins are wiped away.' And I erase the white board. It's clean, your sins are gone. Forgiven."

"That sounds good, right?" I asked the class. And it is good! "But the problem with that view of salvation," I went on, "is that the person who caused that white board to fill up in the first place is still the same person. By erasing the white board I might have dealt with the consequences of your sin, but the sin itself hasn't been touched. So we need more than forgiveness, we need something deeper. We need healing."

One of the ways penal substitutionary atonement distorts our view of salvation is that it over-focuses on the consequences of sin (Judgment Day, hell, God's wrath) rather than upon the sin itself. Sin, I shared with the students, isn't just a crime. Sin is a power in our lives, the thing that causes us to commit the crime in the first place. 

A medical way to frame this is that sin is like an addiction or a disease. Salvation, then, is about healing, wholeness and wellness. "Set the issue of hell aside for the moment," I shared with the class, "Hell is irrelevant. Just think about how unwell you are. God wants to help you right there in your life."

Theologically, what I was sharing with the students was an Augustinian view of salvation, the healing of our affections. Biblically, I was sharing Paul's view of sin and salvation from Romans 7. Critical to this view of salvation-as-healing is the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life, something that penal substitutionary atonement leaves wholly out of the picture.

A third way penal substitutionary atonement distorts our view of salvation, I shared with the students, was that it misses us.

Penal substitutionary atonement tells you that salvation concerns the broken relationship you have with God. You are facing God's judgment, so you need to fix that problem. Or, better put, you need to accept the gift that God repaired the relationship in the death of Jesus. Regardless, the focus is upon the God/Me relationship.

What this view misses about salvation are the horizontal aspects of salvation, the fractured Me/You and Us/Them relationships we see all around us. One of the ways penal substitutionary atonement distorts Christianity is how you can be "saved" in relation to God while treating fellow human beings horribly. This is what theologians mean when they criticize penal substitutionary atonement as "individualistic." Penal substitutionary atonement lacks moral, political, social, economic, and environmental implications and imperatives. 

In the Jewish tradition these horizontal concerns toward each other and the earth are called tikkun olam, "the repair of the world." Penal substitutionary atonement misses tikkun olam. Salvation isn't just fixing my God problem, that if I don't accept Jesus as Lord I'm going to hell. Salvation is involved in the repair of the world. All around us the world is torn and ripped, and we are called to the great and ongoing labors of healing and mending. Christian views of salvation have to include how your life, today, is called to this work of repair. 

Beyond distorting our view of God, when penal substitutionary atonement is taken as the whole truth concerning salvation we also struggle with what's next in our journey of faith.

Basically, when penal substitutionary atonement becomes your sole window on salvation it reduces to "fire insurance," escaping from the judgment of hell. Relatedly, Dallas Willard described penal substitutionary atonement as "vampire Christianity," wanting Jesus only for his blood. 

What's missing from this narrow vision of salvation--salvation as avoiding punishment--is a positive view about what salvation means for our lives and how salvation is a developmental process. We "are saved" but we are also "being saved." 

This is the classic contrast between justification and sanctification. Given its forensic framing, penal substitutionary atonement describes justification, being declared "innocent" and "righteous" in a legal context. Having been declared righteous, though, what's next? You walk out of the courtroom a free person and now have to face and live the rest of your life. For many Christians, this is an anxious prospect, as they feel they have to walk a very fragile, precarious path going forward in the face of the fear that they could "lose" their salvation. Others, having secured a get out of jail free card by the blood of Jesus, never turn to invest in becoming mature, wise, faithful, disciplined, and loving followers of Jesus. We've been justified, but we never get on with the pressing task of sanctification, conforming to the image of Jesus.

This is a problem. The moral witness of Christianity is abysmal. And much of this is due to reducing salvation to penal substitutionary atonement. People "get saved" all the time. Christians who have been "saved" are a dime a dozen. They're everywhere. But Christians who are mature, wise, faithful, disciplined, and loving followers of Jesus? Those are very rare. 

Penal substitutionary atonement distorts the faith because it fails to teach us about what's next, how "the long obedience" of the Christian life is a process of "being saved." Penal substitutionary atonement distorts the faith because it isn't able to tell you this very important and oft-forgotten truth: You are not saved when you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. You've just taken the first step in being saved. Being saved is a process that will encompass your entire life. 

From the Advent portion of W.H. Auden's, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”:

IV

RECITATIVE

If the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move
                                                                              to be made;
If the mind can imagine tomorrow, there is still a defeat
                                                                              to remember;
As long as the self can say "I," it is impossible not to rebel;
As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice:
And the garden cannot exist, the miracle cannot occur.

For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is
                                                                               not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not
                                                                               be apparent,
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you
                                                                              cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have
                                                                               consented to die.

Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe
                                                                              without asking:
The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;
The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;
Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream
                                                                              of your own;
Unless you exclaim -- "There must be some mistake" -- you must
                                                                              be mistaken.

We now reach Chapter 4 of Louise Perry's book The Case Agains the Sexual Revolution, a chapter entitled "Loveless Sex is Not Empowering." And a reading note: there's profanity in this post.

In this chapter, Perry is going to return to and dwell upon the sexual differences between men and women, using those differences to make criticisms about modern discourse and expectations about sex. We've already introduced and discussed some of these topics, but Chapter 4 is the deeper dive.

Perry begins Chapter 4 by describing how women today are now being asked to "have sex like men," and by that she means causal, meaningless sex, where the body of another person is simply used to achieve an orgasm. Casual, meaningless sex isn't masturbation exactly, but it's pretty close to masturbation in both its agenda and motivational profile. 

Perry's description of "having sex like a man" comes from the first episode of Sex in the City, that agitprop for the sexual revolution, where the protagonist Carrie Bradshaw stops looking for "Mr. Right" and resolves to just start enjoying sex. That's what the sexual revolution is all about, right? So Carrie hooks up with an ex-boyfriend, accepting his offer of oral sex. Afterwards, she leaves before he can experience his own orgasm. Reflecting on that asymmetry, Carrie shares with the viewers her emancipatory insight: "As I began to get dressed, I realized that I'd done it. I'd just had sex like a man. I left feeling powerful, potent and incredibly alive. I felt like I owned this city. Nothing and no one could get in my way."

In describing Carrie Bradshaw, along other depictions of female sexual agency on TV, Perry describes how popular culture is placing before a generation of women the ideal of "having sex like a man" and what that entails:

[These female TV] protagonists demonstrate their sexual agency by having loveless, brusque sex with men they don't like. They show no regard for their partners' intimate lives and discard them immediately afterwards. The purpose of the encounter is both physical gratification [and] psychological gratification. They treat their partners as means, not ends, out of a desire for short-term pleasure. Thus it seems that what the phrase having sex 'like a man' really means, at least in these popular representations, is having sex like an arsehole.

Now, how did this trend come about? Perry goes on to describe how men have gotten away with this sort of behavior for generations. And not surprisingly, a lot of rage has built up. Justifiably so. Consequently, what is depicted on shows like Sex in the City is a sort of revenge fantasy. The girl is the one now using and discarding the guy. And no doubt, there's a thrill to seeing that play out onscreen. How's it feel, guys, when the shoe is on the other foot?

And yet, while a revenge fantasy has its gratifications, Kill Bill and The Count of Monte Cristo come to mind, revenge isn't the best foundation upon which to build a healthy sexual ethic. Becoming an asshole just isn't an effective way to bring more joy into your life.

And yet, "having sex like a man," and thereby getting back at men for generations of abuse, is precisely what many feminists encourage. Perry summarizes their argument:

[L]iberal feminism understands having sex 'like a man' as an obvious route by which women can free themselves from old-fashioned patriarchal expectations of chastity and obedience. If you believe that there is nothing wrong, per se, with instrumentalising other people in pursuit of your own sexual gratification, then this makes sense. And if you believe that men and women are both physically and psychologically much the same, save for a few hang-ups absorbed from a sex-negative culture, then why wouldn't you want women to have access to the kind of sexual fun that men have always enjoyed (the high-status ones, at least)? The position is purely reactive: since women have historically been punished for this kind of sexual behavior, liberation must surely mean not only an end to such punishment but also an endorsement of what was once forbidden: fucking back.

Again, given our long history of slut-shaming and scarlet lettering, we can admit to the cathartic pleasures in fucking back, imaginatively onscreen and in one's own personal life. Our double standards in regards to sexual shaming do need to be dismantled. Keen on many people's minds here is how these double standards create the noxious effects we find within evangelical purity culture. 

And yet, using your body and emotional health to "fuck back" might not be a recipe for safety and health. Throwing your body and soul into the maw of hook up culture to advance the cause of female liberation might not lead you to happiness and wholeness. Perry describing the risks and costs of "having sex like men" upon young women:

[The] liberal feminist argument leads us to conclude that, if you are going to destroy the sexual double standard, then you must use your own body, and the bodies of other women, as a battering ram against the patriarchal edifice. The advice to young women is that you must 'fuck back' if you want to be a good feminist, and mostly it will turn out Ok--and when it doesn't? When a sexual encounter turns out to be 'not-ideal', or worse? Well then, we must fall back on liberal feminism's old standby: 'teach men not to rape.'

And the concerns here go beyond physical safety, how a young woman alone with a man might find her attempt at "fucking back" go sideways. Beyond physical risks there are also steep emotional costs in having loveless sex, costs that affect women, by and large, more than men. We'll turn to those costs as we go deeper into Chapter 4. 

Today, then, just the conclusion that if the ethic of the sexual revolution means treating people as disposable and discardable, is it any wonder why modern sex is experienced as so unsafe and unsatisfying?

If we're telling our young people, both boys and girls, to have sex like assholes the outcomes here seem pretty predictable.

After describing penal substitutionary atonement as "true, but partial, and therefore distorting," I then walked the class through some of those issues, problems, and distortions.

The first and biggest distortion associated with penal substitutionary atonement, I told the class of seniors, is that it makes God your problem.

This issue is well-documented and well-known. When your view of salvation reduces to penal substitutionary atonement your sole spiritual predicament is avoiding the judgment of God. God is going to send you to hell. Talk about salvation is always about avoiding some bad thing that God is going to do to you. When this fear is framed in its crudest terms, we come to feel that God is wanting to kill us. Because isn't that what happens on the cross, that the death sentence aimed at us is directed toward Jesus who dies in my place?

Again, you're probably very aware of this problem, how when penal substitutionary atonement is the only note you play in the song of salvation we instill a fear of God in our children. We also send them missed messages. God loves you unconditionally and God is going to send you to hell. So which is it? Seems like unconditional love has a lot of strings attached.

It's at this point where defenders of penal substitutionary atonement will step in and say, "Well, sure, but it is true, is it not, that Jesus is saving us from judgment? I have book, chapter, and verse to prove that." 

That response is precisely why I began my talk and this series with the "true, but partial, and therefore distorting" observation. The point isn't to deny that the death of Jesus saves us from some bad outcome heading our way. Like I said in the last post, penal substitutionary atonement is true. The death of Jesus saves us from eschatological hazard. But when that truth becomes the whole truth, we reduce salvation to avoiding hell. Salvation becomes "fire insurance." Salvation becomes all about avoiding the judgment of God. Salvation is just about fixing your God problem.

Again, this isn't to suggest that salvation doesn't involve creating peace between God and a rebellious humanity. As 2 Corinthians 5.18 describes, in Christ we are reconciled to God. So something is mended between us and God in salvation. We don't want to deny that. But when that fracture is reductively highlighted, and we morbidly fixate upon the "sinners in the hands of an angry God" framing, we come to think and feel that God isn't really on our side, but is, rather, a fickle, wrathful, and punitive God. Salvation is reduced to being rescued from the Scary Person in the Sky. And that message just doesn't sound like good news.

Twice now it's been my honor to visit Cason Pyle's senior Bible class at Abilene Christian School, where my wife is the High School Theatre teacher. Cason has invited me to speak to the class about salvation, and I've used most of that time to explore issues and problems with penal substitutionary atonement, the dominant view held by the students and the churches they come from. This series will be blogging through the main beats of my talk.

After introducing the class to the word "soteriology," as that is what we're talking about, I then sketch out the main points of penal substitutionary atonement. These should be familiar to you. Our sins bring us under the judgment of God. Jesus, in his death on the cross, takes on my punishment, substituting himself in my place. I receive that gift by faith. 

For the students in the class, this view--penal substitutionary atonement--"just is" salvation. Full stop. 

So the first thing I say to the class is this: Penal substitutionary atonement is true, but partial, and therefore distorting.

I think it's important to start by saying that penal substitutionary atonement is true. I think a lot of progressive Christians just blow past that point. Penal substitutionary atonement is the great whipping post of ex-evangelicals. But progressive Christians tend to ignore the fact that penal substitutionary atonement is right there in Scripture. 

By "true" I don't mean that the whole theorized mechanism is laid out in book, chapter and verse. Just that the offending ideas that make up penal substitutionary atonement are actually in the Bible. Shall we review? The wages of sin is death (Romans 6.23). Jesus bore our sins on the cross (1 Peter 2.4). For our sake Jesus became sin (2 Corinthians 5.21). Jesus died for our sins (1 Corinthians 15.3). Jesus redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse (Galatians 3.13). Jesus' blood saves us from the wrath to come (Romans 5.9). Jesus' blood washes away our sins (Revelation 1.5). Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1.29). Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins (Hebrews 9.22). Jesus' death was a propitiation for sins (1 John 2.2). 

I could go on, but you get the point. Penal substitutionary atonement is true. Or more carefully stated, the ideas behind penal substitutionary atonement have ample Scriptural support. What offends about penal substitutionary atonement is actually in Bible.

Given that, I think it is unwise for progressive types to just chuck the whole thing. I'd suggest not squeezing the Bible into your cozy progressive box. Be disturbed. It'll be good medicine.

That said, while penal substitutionary atonement is true, it is only a partial truth. It's not the whole story. And partial truths, when taken to be the whole truth, can be distorting. As I shared with the seniors, how many times have you heard a story which enrages you. In your outrage, you share your feelings with a person involved. But that person says, "Hold on. You're missing a few critical details." Upon hearing those details, everything changes and you're no longer outraged. That partial truth you had was true, but partial, and therefore distorting. In fact, a partial truth can point you in the exact opposite direction of the whole truth.

Penal substitutionary atonement is like that, I told the class. It's true, it's right there in Scripture, but it's a partial truth and therefore distorting.

I'll turn to those distortions in the posts to come.

I've been blogging since 2007, and over the years I've written many Advent and Christmas reflections. Three of these have been particularly popular, and I want to share them with new readers, and again with longtime readers who would like to revisit some memories and old favorites:

Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
Perhaps my most viral Christmas post, a playful meditation using the Christmas TV classics How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and A Charlie Brown Christmas to sneak up on "the true meaning of Christmas." 

A bit from that post reflecting on the misfit themes in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer:

At this point in the show all the misfit themes are coming to a climax. We see misfits seeking community, we see empathy as one misfit identifies with another, and, finally, we see one misfit seeking to act as savior. A misfit to save the misfits. A misfit Messiah.

But the theology of Rudolph takes its most radical, surprising, and extreme turn when the personification of evil, The Abominable Snowman, comes back from death in a quirky resurrection event--Bumble's Bounce!--as a peaceable creature who is also in need of loving community. Apparently, this "evil" creature is also a misfit. And the hint is that he's "abominable" because he's been marginalized and without community.

So, summarizing all this, I learned from Rudolph this important lesson about Christmas: Something about Christmas means misfits have a place, a community, a home. Or, rephrased, Christmas means that there are no more misfits.

Christmas Carols as Resistance Literature
Christmas carols as subversive? In this post I talk about two Christmas carols--O Holy Night and It Came Upon a Midnight Clear--to highlight the political commentary in the lyrics. Beyond being shared a lot on social media, this post has been used by churches for sermons and Bible classes during the Advent season. Some from that post:

Recall that the song and the French poem O Holy Night were written in 1847. The English version was written in 1855, six years before the American Civil War and eight years before the Emancipation Proclamation. O Holy Night, it turns out, was a song of political resistance and protest. Imagine Americans singing in the years leading up to the Civil War the lyrics "Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother; And in His name all oppression shall cease."

O Holy Night as political protest. A Christmas carol as resistance literature.

Piss Christ in Prison: An Unlikely Advent Meditation
As you can tell from the title, an edgy post from my prison Bible study. Leaning on my book Unclean, I use Andres Serrano's controversial artwork Piss Christ to recover the shock of the Incarnation in its message of scandalous, unbelievable grace. Some from that post:

[The shock and offense we experience from Andres Serrano's photo Piss Christ] is an example of the attribution called negativity dominance in judgments of contamination. That is, when the pure comes in contact with the contaminant the pure becomes polluted. The negative dominates over the positive. The power is not with the pure but sits with the pollutant.

This is why the Pharisees see Jesus becoming defiled when he eats with tax collectors and sinners. The pollutant--the tax collectors and sinners--defiles Jesus, the pure. The negative dominates over the positive. The pollutant is the stronger force. Thus it never occurs to the Pharisees, because it is psychologically counter-intuitive, that Jesus's presence might sanctify or purify those sinners he is eating with. Because pollution doesn't work that way.

Thus, in the contact between urine and Jesus in Piss Christ we instinctively judge the negative to be stronger than the positive. Thus the shock. Thus the blasphemy.

But the real blasphemy just might be this: That we think urine is stronger than Christ. That we instinctively--and blasphemously--believe that the defilement of our lives is the strongest force in the universe. Stronger even than the grace of God.

This Advent I've been re-reading Paul Griffiths' book Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures. I wanted to read a book about eschatology during Advent in keeping with the seasonal focus on the Second Coming.

Decreation has a fascinating speculative section about angels. Griffiths is a Catholic theologian, and Decreation is a work of speculative theology within the magisterial "grammar." That is, Griffiths works within the boundaries of Catholic doctrine, speculating about things within that framework. It's like exploring unexplored or under-explored territory within the borders of a country,

Concerning the angels, Catholic doctrine most definitely assumes that they exit and have had significant interactions with humans and human history. Consequently, in Decreation Griffiths assumes the existence of angels and speculates about their nature, activity, and destiny. Theologians of the past once devoted a great deal of attention to angels. But among modern theologians, angelology is a marginalized topic due to scholarly embarrassment. No serious scholar wants to be talking about angels in front of their peers at a scholarly conference. You'd look a bit cuckoo. 

Here's Griffiths writing about the place of angels in modern theology and popular culture:

Angelology is not a prominent topic in contemporary academic or ecclesial theology. In the 1970s I read theology as an undergraduate at Oxford without the topic ever being raised, so far as I can recall. Much the same is true, I should think, in theological education in Europe and North America today. I teach in a school of divinity in the United States [Griffiths teaches at Duke University], a place where young men and women are trained for ordained ministry in one or another Protestant denomination, and, for the most part, they go through their training without ever being called on to give theological thought to the question of the angels, or to attempt an account of these interesting beings. The presence of angels (and demons) in the texts of the Christian archive is of course acknowledged, especially their prominent place in Scripture; and the thought of this or that person--Augustine, Denys, Bonaventure, Thomas, even the Protestant divines and poets--on the subject is acknowledged and treated when it comes up. But by and large, it is treated historically rather than theologically, and often with some embarrassment. Angelology is not thought of by many theologians working today as a locus of importance for theological thinking.

Things are very different among Christians on the ground in most of the world. The catalogs of publishers of devotional material, Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox, in the United States, offer and enormous body of literature about the angels; and purveyors of Christian goods display an cornucopia of angels--statues, images, books of prayers to them, guides to how to arrive at intimacy with your very own guardian angel, and so forth. Much of this is deeply sentimental...

Reading this passage during Advent really struck me. Because angels are absolutely everywhere during the Advent and Christmas seasons. Advent and Christmas are stuffed with angels.

The reasons for this are obvious. The Nativity texts in Matthew and Luke are dense with angelic activity. The birth of Jesus was, perhaps, the busiest moment in the history of human/angelic affairs. Angels are everywhere in the Nativity story. Angels appear to Zechariah, Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, and very likely the Magi. (The Magi are "warned in the dream" to not return to Herod. How that warning is given is not described, but it's safe to assume, given how Joseph is later warned in a dream by an angel to flee to Egypt, that the warning to the Magi also involved an angel.)

Because of these texts angels fill our Advent and Christmas seasons. Angels top our Christmas trees. Angel ornaments fill our houses. Lighted angel displays appear in our yards. Angels inhabit our Nativity sets. We dress our children up as angels for our Nativity plays. And we sing song after song about angels. Like I said, Advent and Christmas is stuffed with angels. You can't talk about Advent and Christmas without mentioning the activity of angels.

And then--poof!--they're gone. The season moves on and the angels fade into the background, awaiting their annual reemergence in secular and sacred consciousness the next holiday season. 

Following Griffiths, I find all this profoundly odd. There's this huge deluge of sentimental talk and depiction of angels during Christmas and Advent that completely evaporates from Christian consciousness the rest of the year. Well, as Griffiths points out, it doesn't really evaporate among the people in the pews, where angels remain objects of fascination. But angels do evaporate as an object of Biblical and theological reflection among theologians and pastors. We preach the Advent series, where we talk constantly about angelic activity, because we have to given the Biblical texts, but never to pause to wonder out loud what all this angelic activity might mean about the cosmos and our lives outside of the Christmas season. Simply put, angels have implications. We love the stories about angels during Christmas, love singing "Angels We Have Heard on High," but never get around to exploring the implications of those stories, angelically speaking.

And this is why, I think, a sentimental Precious Moments approach to angels pervades our culture. Look at the angel section of any bookstore and you'll see a lot of silly, embarrassing stuff. But that's not the fault of the culture. I blame the pastors, scholars and theologians! As Griffiths points out, the Christian teaching class has ceded the field to the purveyors of sentimentality and sensationalism. Christian intellectuals don't say boo about angels, fearing embarrassment in front of their snobby peers, creating a theological vacuum that gets filled with kitsch and nonsense. 

What, then, in my suggestion? Well, I think the Advent and Christmas season just might be the perfect time to talk about the angels. Angels are everywhere right now. We're telling stories about them, seeing them, and singing about them. But most of this is done unreflectively. We hardly know what we're saying or singing. We just strap some wings on Junior, adjust his halo, and push him onstage for the Christmas pageant. "How sweet!" we exclaim. We share stories about angels this time of year the same way we talk about Santa Claus. Angels are just seasonal sentimental supernaturalism. 

But all this is our fault. I blame the pastors and theologians. Angels have implications. We're just too embarrassed to talk about them.

From the Annunciation portion of W.H. Auden's “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio." Gabriel's words to Mary:

GABRIEL

When Eve, in love with her own will,
Denied the will of Love and fell,
She turned the flesh Love knew so well
To knowledge of her love until
Both love and knowledge were of sin;
What her negation wounded, may
Your affirmation heal to-day;
Love's will requires your own that in
The flesh whose love you do not know,
Love's knowledge into flesh may grow.
...
Since Adam, being free to choose,
Chose to imagine he was free
To chose his own necessity,
Lost in his freedom, Man pursues
The shadow of his images:
To-day the Unknown seeks the known;
What I am willed to ask, your own
Will has to answer; child it lies
Within your power of choosing to
Conceive the Child who chooses you.

(Photo Note. One of my favorite paintings of the Annunciation. Henry Ossawa Tanner's "The Annunciation" 1898) 

In Chapter 2 of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution entitled "Some Desires are Bad," Louise Perry describes how the sexual revolution displays moral impoverishment in the face of the mainstreaming of sexual desires that most of us would consider objectively bad. One example she discusses are cultural attempts to normalize pedophilia, and how liberals struggle to resist these trends given their reductive focus upon consent. Perry argues:

Paedophilia is now condemned by liberals and conservatives alike, alongside a clutch of other paraphilias, including necrophilia and bestiality. For liberals, the wall between licit and illicit sexual behavior is now built upon an emphasis on consent...The problem with paedophilia, according to this argument, is that children can't consent, and therefore any sexual activity involving them will always be unacceptable...

But upon closer scrutiny, the consent argument fall apart. Liberals may be able to accept the banning of child porn without any qualms, since it necessitates the abuse of real children in its production, but what about images that the police term 'pseudo-photographs' that appear to depict real children? What about illustrations? What about adults dressing up and pretending to be children during sex? What about porn performers who appear to be very young? What about porn performers who make themselves look even younger? ...

Perry's point is that the sexual revolution lacks the moral competency to declare pedophilic-adjacent sexual desires and activity as illicit. Since no one is being harmed, no one can object. In short, the ethic of the sexual revolution is too narrow to capture all we want to declare bad or wrong in the sexual arena. 

Perry goes on to describe other desires that most of us would consider illicit, along with the grey areas surrounding issues of consent. Perry reviews some #MeToo cases, like that of comedian Aziz Ansari, where consent was technically given but where everyone agrees that the man behaved badly. In case after case, our moral appraisals exceed and go beyond the narrow ethic of consent. There's so much we want to say about sex, but lack the moral framework to have the conversations and render moral judgments. The ethic of the sexual revolution is too thin and impoverished to handle the complexity of our sexual lives and the moral intuitions we all experience in making judgments, from paraphilias to the ambiguities of consent revealed by #MeToo. 

Perry concludes the chapter by making a case for character, what she describes as "the virtue of repression." That's a provocative claim, given how the sexual revolution has stigmatized sexual repression. Today, repressing your sexual impulses is considered to be unhealthy Victorian prudishness. We've been encouraged to express ourselves and gratify our every sexual desire. But as Perry points out in this chapter, not everything we desire is good. Some desires are bad, and we should work to repress those desires. This seems like common sense, but the sexual revolution is quiet on this point. Worse, in many cases, as with pedophilic-adjacent or violent pornography, the sexual revolution encourages bad desires.

For Perry, the repression of bad sexual desires is an act of care that serves a protective function. Mortifying my bad desires makes room for a concern about the other, about what they most need and want. Perry writes,

I can't pretend that this is an easy issue to resolve, because 'How should we behave sexually?' is really just another way of asking 'How should we behave?' and, after a millennia of effort, we are nowhere near reaching an agreement on the answer to that question. Nevertheless, here is my attempt at a contribution: we should treat our sexual partners with dignity. We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all our sexual relationships, regardless of whether they are gay or straight. We should prioritize virtue over desire. We should not assume that any given feeling we discover in our hearts (or our loins) ought to be acted upon...

A sophisticated system of sexual ethics needs to demand more of people, and, as the stronger and hornier sex, men must demonstrate even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation. The word 'chivalry' is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what I'm calling for.

Perry goes on to quote the feminist theorist Mary Harrington:

'Chivalrous' social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But...the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.

We can discuss the various topics discussed above, from the grey areas revealed by #MeToo to the normalizing of pedophilia in our culture to the morality of pornography to if chivalry is good or bad for women. But the key point Perry is making that I want to highlight is summed up in her comment that we need to "prioritize virtue over desire." The point here is that the sexual revolution cannot deliver on what it promises. If we want our sexual lives to be characterized by mutuality, care, concern, kindness, and dignity--to say nothing about love--we need virtue to deliver that package. Desire itself will not get us to the Promised Land. Desire can, though, pave the highway to hell. 

Simply put, given the harm and damage we can do to each other, sexuality demands more than consent, it demands goodness. And goodness is a virtue that demands the mastery of desires, especially bad ones. The "virtue of repression" isn't a retreat into a pearl-clutching puritanism, but the moral foundation of a mutual, concerned, care-full, other-oriented sexuality. 

Virtue is how we come to treat our sexual partners with care and dignity. We need character as much as consent. 

"The Waiting Season"

This is the between time,
the groaning time,
where seconds fall dead
from tired trees.
This is the moaning season,
the waiting season,
where dreams blow down
sickened streets,
and hopes are heaped
awaiting entombment
in black plastic bags destined 
for the metastasizing landfill
haunting the edge of town.

Nothing good can come of this.
Nothing good can come from this.

Possibility is burning in the dumpster fire,
the smoke filling the gap
between my 8:00 and my 9:30 appointments
as I stand scrolling TikTok
in the zombie line at Starbucks.
Tick Tok Tick Tok Tick Tock
goes the clock
counting down to the darkness
as the ashes pile up like snow.

///

In Advent poems I've written in the past, I've tended to place myself in the experience of Israel's exile. In this poem I was trying to get into the experience of exile in our time and place, channeling my inner T.S. Eliot and "The Waste Land."

The point isn't to be grim and existential during Advent as ends in themselves. Although I can be grim and existential. Sometimes I do feel that our dreams blow down sickened streets. The point of dwelling on exilic themes during Advent is, rather, to cultivate a contrast with Christmas Day, where the birth of Jesus comes to us as Unexpected Explosive Surprise. You're standing like a zombie in a Starbucks line, scrolling through social media for the millionth time. The death-ashes of the modern world pile up around you like a snowdrift. And then, out of nowhere...news. And a new world is born.

Let me say it this way: if you're not experiencing the sheer relief of Christmas on December 25, you've been missing a critical element of Advent.

In our adult faith Bible class at church, one of my co-teachers, Vic McCracken, asked us a question. Vic is an ethicist, and in the class he was asking us to explore how advances in science have created new and novel problems for Christian ethics. The Bible was written over 2,000 years ago, so its moral imagination hadn't envisioned something like stem cell research. How, then, do we apply the moral vision of Scripture to novel modern problems?

In getting us to ponder this issue, Vic asked us the question, "What is new in the world that wasn't around when the Bible was written?"

Most of the examples shared by the class were scientific and technological advances, and how these create ethical issues for us. But I raised my hand and shared this: "Democracy and capitalism. Those are new."

I don't know if you've noticed, but Christians can't get on the same page when it comes to how to think about democracy and capitalism. And a large part of that problem stems from the fact that the moral vision of the Bible was forged within a colonial outpost of an Imperial Empire with a patronage economy supported by various forms of servitude and slavery (think of Joseph in Egypt and the household codes for masters and slaves/servants in the Pauline epistles). The Biblical moral vision was worked out within those contexts, making it difficult for us to draw a straight line to our world of voting, political activism, Wall Street, paychecks, income taxes, and welfare. And because of this disjoint, confusion reigns. 

Consider the following moral questions.

Regarding democratic politics: Are Christians supposed to use their collective political power--their united vote--to make their nation states conform to Christian ideals and values? Or should Christians create a hospitable space in the public sphere, allowing diverse values and worldviews to exist side by side, even if Christians disagree with them?

Regarding capitalistic economies: Given the power of capitalism to lift the world out of poverty, should Christians step back to let the "invisible hand" of free-markets do the work in directing our shared economic life? Or should Christians ask the state to regulate markets in order to provide a more robust social safety net for its citizens, along with protections for the environment, even if these pursuits involve market inefficiency, perverse social and corporate incentives, and a greater tax burden? 

Most of the political and economic debates among Christians swirl around these two sets of questions. And what makes the debate so frustrating is that the Bible doesn't give clear guidance on these issues. What people tend to do is pick and choose Bible verses that support their preferred politics, ignoring countervailing texts that point in difference directions. 

Consequently, I am very skeptical of any viewpoint or position that purports to tell us exactly what Christians are to think or believe about politics and economic policy. 

Yesterday I shared thoughts inspired by Fleming Rutledge's collection of sermons and writings about Advent. 

As I mentioned in that post, Advent has suffered from "Christmas capture" in our churches. We look solely toward the past during this season and thereby lose the future-oriented, eschatological aspect of Advent. 

To illustrate this focus upon the Second Coming of Christ during Advent, and its impact upon our lives, Rutledge shares this quote from Will Willimon at the start of her book:

Our lives are eschatologically stretched between the sneak preview of the new world being born among us in the church, and the old world where the principalities and powers are reluctant to give way. In the meantime, which is the only time the church has ever known, we live as those who know something about the fate of the world that the world does not yet know. And that makes us different.

For Advent this year I'm re-reading Fleming Rutledge's collection of sermons and writings about Advent. 

A key point made by Rutledge is that we've lost sight of the true meaning of Advent. By "true meaning" I mean "church historical" meaning. 

Like so many things, Advent has succumbed to "Christmas capture." Advent is simply a way to extend the Christmas season. And, of course, Advent is looking forward to the "first coming" of Christ in the Incarnation. Advent prepares for Christmas. 

But the main focus of Advent in church history has always been looking forward to and preparing for the "second coming" of Christ in eschatological vindication, victory and judgment. (This is also sometimes called the "third coming." The "second coming," in this scheme, is identified with the coming of Christ into our lives upon our baptism.) 

The focus of Advent upon the Second Coming of Christ, with its demand for constant watchfulness, is rarely talked about in our churches during the weeks leading up to Christmas. That topic is too anxiety-inducing and has a judgey vibe. And so, we keep Advent strictly focused upon the Baby Jesus. Advent becomes wholly about the past, and loses its future-oriented, eschatological aspect. 

Do you know the church has traditionally used for Advent texts? Passages like this one from Matthew 25:

At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep.

“At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’

“Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.’

“‘No,’ they replied, ‘there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.’

“But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut.

“Later the others also came. ‘Lord, Lord,’ they said, ‘open the door for us!’

“But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.’

“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour."

Few churches, I'm guessing, will preach the Parable of the Ten Virgins during this Advent season. But this parable gets to the true--church historical--meaning of Advent: "Keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour" of the Lord's coming.

(Photo is of William Blake's "Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins")

From the Advent portion of W.H. Auden's, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”:

II

NARRATOR

...But then we were children: That was a moment ago,
Before an outrageous novelty had been introduced
Into our lives. Why were we never warned? Perhaps we were.
Perhaps that mysterious noise at the back of the brain
We noticed on certain occasions—sitting alone
In the waiting room of the country junction, looking
Up at the toilet window—was not indigestion
But this Horror starting already to scratch Its way in?
Just how, just when It succeeded we shall never know:
We can only say that now It is there and that nothing
We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest use,
For nothing like It has happened before. It’s as if
We had left our house for five minutes to mail a letter,
And during that time the living room had changed places
With the room behind the mirror over the fireplace;
It’s as if, waking up with a start, we discovered
Ourselves stretched out flat on the floor, watching our shadow
Sleepily stretching itself at the window. I mean
That the world of space where events re-occur is still there,
Only now it’s no longer real; the real one is nowhere
Where time never moves and nothing can ever happen:
I mean that although there’s a person we know all about
Still bearing our name and loving himself as before,
That person has become a fiction; our true existence
Is decided by no one and has no importance to love.

That is why we despair; that is why we would welcome
The nursery bogey or the winecellar ghost, why even
The violent howling of winter and war has become
Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are afraid
Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare
Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.
This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.

III

CHORUS

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood...

Welcome to Advent! Amiright? 

But seriously, these lines from Auden at the opening of his Christmas Oratorio really speak into the Advent season of waiting and longing, the same themes I explore in the poems I shared last week gathered under "Exile." Advent explores that dislocation and desolation I describe as "the Ache" in Hunting Magic Eels, feeling "alone, alone, about a dreadful wood."

Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus.