Does the Christian Sexual Ethic ask LGBTQ+ persons to deny themselves love? (3/5)
You are reading the third installment in a series of posts where we are asking the question: Does a Christian sexual ethic harm LGBTQ+ persons? This is an important question for me as I seek to spread the truth and love of Jesus to all people, including those belonging to the LGBTQ+ community at the University of Louisville.
In my first post, I tried to give a working definition for what the traditional Christian sexual ethic is. In my second post, I addressed the concern of whether the Christian sexual ethic asks members of the LGBTQ+ to deny who they are. In this post, I want to address the question: Does the Christian sexual ethic ask LGBTQ+ persons to deny themselves love?
ALL WE NEED IS SEXUAL LOVE?
Ed Shaw currently serves as the pastor of Emmanuel City Centre in Bristol England. He also happens to experience same-sex attraction. Shaw has decided to live a celibate life as a follower of Jesus, but what should we think about Shaw’s choice? Some might see this situation as another sad example of how the Christian sexual ethic oppressively stamps out any hope for an LGBTQ+ person from experiencing something as basic to human flourishing as love. Love is love. Isn’t it?
In his extremely insightful and helpful book, Same-sex Attraction and the Church, Shaw identifies nine “missteps” that the Church has taken in response to the broader culture regarding this topic—missteps that have made the Christian sexual ethic sound implausible to many modern Western ears.
One misstep Shaw identifies is one that equates sex and intimacy.[1] Think about it…wouldn’t you think someone was asking you a question about your sex life if they asked: “Have you been intimate with anyone lately?” Of course you would, but maybe that is more of a comment on our current world than the awkwardness of the question.[2]
Maybe we are thinking about intimacy and love all wrong. No one doubts that human beings need intimacy to flourish—and I think we would all agree that the sexual act is a very intimate one—but is sex the only place where intimacy and true love can be found? In contrast to the answer that too quickly rolls off the tongue of many today, Shaw and others have been quick to answer with a solid “No!”
One among this chorus of “No’s!” is former Gay rights activist, David Bennett, who admits to having brandished the “Love is love” slogan on more than one occasion in his previous battles against the Christian sexual ethic. Now as a same-sex attracted celibate Christian, Bennett goes as far as to say: “Those who define themselves through eros are actually seeking the transcendence of union with God. But they will never find it in human relationships.”[3]
God is not calling us to experience less love, he is calling us to experience a deeper kind of love—one that forever flows out from the very heart of God and shapes what love between humans should look like in the same way a mighty river shapes the contours of the land around it. I think we all have a sense that the love we long for is deeper than the love captured in the “Love is love” slogan.
This deeper love we all long for is grounded in the reality of our being made in the image of a God who is love. God is love (1 John 4:8) in that God, the Father, has loved God, the Son, for all of eternity (John 17:24). We are all meant to enter into this divine dance of love.[4]
In another place, Bennett writes: “Practically, all lesser loves, even the incredible intimacy of marriage, is a half shadow of the great love we were made to experience.”[5] If you become familiar with Bennett and his writing, you will know that the experience of love he is referring to is that which is found in communion with the triune God of Christianity and Christ’s bride, the Church.
The love of God is a love that is holy and that seeks to slowly but surely eradicate anything in the beloved that is unholy. It is this holy love that becomes the measure of the truthfulness of every other love. Every other love we experience is meant to reflect the love that has existed for all eternity between the persons of the Trinity and between Jesus and his people—a people who he purchased with his own blood shed on the cross where this holy love is displayed most brilliantly.
BACK TO OUR QUESTION
Does a Christian sexual ethic bar persons belonging to the LGBTQ+ community from experiencing love? No, it is an invitation to experience a love that is beyond all other loves. It is invitation to experience God as loving husband (see Isaiah 54:4-8) and Christ as Bridegroom (Lk 5:34; Jn 3:29; Rev 19:6f; 21:1ff). A love that is reflected in the love that exists between friends, church members, and married couples who sacrificially give themselves for the flourishing of the other. One that reflects the oneness without sameness that exists between the persons of the Godhead: Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and one that reflects the sacrifice Jesus made when he willingly laid down his life for us on the cross.
I present these truths to you, dear reader, as bricks making up the warm and inviting home that houses the claim I am trying to persuade you of in this series of blogs: The Christian sexual ethic is not harmful to LGBTQ+ persons, rather it is an invitation to all people to submit themselves to a loving God who created them in order to reflect his triune nature and the glory of the gospel.
————
[1] See “Misstep #5” in Ed Shaw, Same-Sex Attraction and the Church: The Surprising Plausibility of the Celibate Life (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 71-79.
[2] I was inspired by the following Blog post by Andrew Blunt for this point: https://www.livingout.org/resources/posts/86/have-you-been-intimate-with-anyone-recently
[3] David Bennett, A War of Loves: The Unexpected Story of a Gay Activist Discovering Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), 165.
[4] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 172-177.
[5] Bennett, A War of Loves, 163.