Origen on Singleness

Did you ever play the game Telephone when you were a child?

Probably, though it goes by many names: I and my friends (at least three for the game to work, but more was better) gathered in a circle. One of us chose a completely random phrase or sentence - the weirder, the better. Something like, Every evening Sally's six dogs howl at a silver moon would fit the bill nicely. Then we proceeded to whisper the word in each other's ears, and when the last person heard the phrase, they announced to the room what they'd heard.

Played right, they'd heard something very, very different than what was originally spoken - for instance, Salad and soup hot on the stove oven instead of a description of Sally's dogs' nocturnal activities. The fun was the astonishing way that words changed, from one person to another.

With Christian theology, much the same thing happens: As we whisper the words of God from one generation to the next, much truth abides, but some is taken, lost in translation as culture and language shift imperceptibly across the years. That's why we need to read and re-read the Bible, and it's also why we need to pay attention to what the early Christians, closest in time and culture to the first speakers, wrote.

Turns out, they wrote some interesting things about singleness, especially about the virgins in the church, women, we would say in today's American Christian lingo, who had the gift of singleness. Origin, describing the pagan religions, writes:

Attached to the other so-called gods are a select number of virgins, who are guarded by men, or it may be not guarded (for that is not the point in question at present), and who are supposed to live in purity for the honour of the god they serve. 

But among Christians, those who maintain a perpetual virginity do so for no human honours, for no fee or reward, from no motive of vainglory; but "as they choose to retain God in their knowledge," they are preserved by God in a spirit well-pleasing to Him, and in the discharge of every duty, being filled with all righteousness and goodness.

What I find most interesting in this passage is the stark difference between the role of virgins in the early church, and their role in the modern evangelical church:

The Role of Singles

Obviously, Origen is not writing about the modern evangelical church at all. Yet the clue to this difference is in the motivation for singleness. At least according to Origen, believing women voluntarily chose virginity: That he uses the word "maintain" suggests this is a deliberate, day-by-day choice on their part, not simply an accident or bad luck or the inability to attract a man.

Notably, this is not the view held towards singleness in the evangelical church. Today, singleness is rarely considered a choice (As a side note, those perpetual reminders to wait on God for a spouse do a great deal to discourage men and women from seeking out life partners.) More troubling, singleness is considered, for every single person living without a spouse, a spiritual gift. Sometimes, it is virginity specifically that is the gift: Josh Harris tells readers that those who 'are single right now' are 'called, right now, to be single'. Leslie Ludy warns her women readers not to have sex before marriage, not to give up their "most precious gift". Even though there's nothing wrong with wanting me to married, she adds, 'singleness is a gift, an opportunity, a blessing and it should be treated as such.'

Don't get me wrong: Obviously, treating singleness as a blessing, looking for ways to be contented, is a guarantee of happier single years than treating singleness as a curse, moaning about missing Mr. Right. Yet the attitude we have towards our single years does not change the fact that the church has radically redefined what it means to have the gift of singleness. Despite the description of the "gift of singleness" as a "blessing" and an "opportunity", this gift is linked inextricably to particular ministry patterns, which means that, often enough, the church prescribes particular ministry patterns to its members based on the accident of their sociological status.

Apparently for Origen (as for Christ), the gift of celibacy was not something that every unmarried person had by default; it was something deliberately elected; the celibate believer, though "preserved by God in a spirit well-pleasing to Him", actually chose to be celibate. Today, this is not the case: the gift of celibacy is a default gift, bestowed upon everyone who has, for whatever reason, failed to make it to the altar.

The Responsibilities of Singles

Among the many problems with treating celibacy like a default gift, instead of a deliberate choice, is that singles, en masse, are put on a kind of spiritual pedestal, or at least shuttled into a different spiritual category. This is, perhaps, as much an effect of American's tendency to group by demographic: Sure, we have special Sunday school classes and work projects for singles, but we also have special Sunday school classes for young moms, young marrieds, old marrieds, college students, unemployed, underemployed, and perhaps one day the Blue Man Group. Yet the fact remains that we do consider singles their own special group in the church, with a very special set of abilities, and the fact that they are all considered, by default not choice, to have the gift of singleness may have something to do with it.

Think about it: Josh Harris suggests that "we find the real beauty [of singleness] in using our freedom to serve God with abandon" - with abandon, meaning, presumably, that we pour more hours, more energy, more effort into the church than our married compatriots. More specifically, Leslie Ludy says that "singleness is an incredible opportunity to be fully consecrated in body and spirit to Jesus Christ alone" - as though married people are somehow off the hook of spiritual commitment, asked to love God with only half their heart since the other half is, of course, reserved for the spouse.

Obviously, most married people would not say they believe married people are excused from deep devotion and service for Jesus Christ. Yet their words betray them: Singles are, at least in the rhetoric of the church, held to a higher spiritual standard by virtue of having the default gift of singleness.

Unfortunately, having the default gift of singleness, being held to a higher standard of devotion to God than married people, does not earn singles the respect of the church. Leslie Ludy, just a page after encouraging singles to live consecrated for Christ, writes this: "Whether we have a  man in our life or not, it is always a challenge to silence the selfish demands of our whims and emotions and become consumed with Him alone. But until we do, we aren't truly ready for an earthly romance". In other words, not only are singles expected to be specially consecrated to Christ, they are also assumed, by virtue of not having an earthly romance, to not yet properly learned to be consumed with Christ alone. Those who have what Ludy calls the "gift of singleness" are somehow simultaneously less spiritually mature and more spiritually responsible than married people, more likely to have difficulty following Christ wholeheartedly but called to do just that, on the basis of their default gift.

Here is where Origen's view of celibacy comes in: So long as virginity is a default gift, the church will continue to paint with a broad brush, make sweeping generalizations about the spiritual maturity and responsibilities of unmarried believers. Yet when celibacy is recognized as a unique spiritual gift, deliberately practiced, the generalizations fall away and singles, as well as married people, are allowed to live out their unique calling in the grace of God.

I find it interesting that Origen, unlike Ludy or Harris, stresses the grace of God as part of walking chastely: Singles, he writes, "are preserved by God in a spirit well-pleasing to him, and in the discharge of every duty, being filled with all righteousness and goodness". When singles are no longer held to a higher spiritual standard, when married people are no longer assumed to be inherently more spiritual, married and single people alike benefit: Freed of expectations, they are allowed to walk in the "righteousness and goodness" of God.

I want to return to Lauren Winner's point, though I've quoted her before: Believers, she writes, "resist strong bodily urges like sexual desires not primarily through willpower, but through grace". True, and we could go a step further: Not only sexual desires but all kinds of desires, physical or otherwise, are resisted not through willpower but through grace. We who believe are humble, generous and temperate instead of proud, avaricious and gluttonous only because of the grace of God. Living chaste is in the end no different from living as a Christian, and everyone - those who are married, those who are single and want to be married, and those who are single and have no desire to be married - is called above all to walk in the grace and goodness of God.

Let's Talk about Singleness

Sometimes, I wonder: Do I talk too much about singleness and the church? My Composition students have particularly gotten an earful. Urged by a professional development seminar this summer to share my own writing with students, I referred them to the Project TGM post I wrote about singleness. I talked about the interview I conducted among my single friends.

I'm sure they heard all of this and secretly wondered whether I was only obsessed with singleness because I am a single woman, wondered whether my greatest fear was becoming the stereotypical "old cat lady" twenty years from now - just me, a tiny bungalow, and seven cats for company. (Full disclosure: I am happy in my singleness, and I do actually want to own a cat someday.)

Yet regardless of whether I sound unhappy or not, regardless of how those of us who talk about singleness are perceived, the issue matters. The problem is not actually whether or not we are happy; the problem is that, far too often, the way Christians talk about singleness denies singles, and especially single women, recognition as whole, growing members in the body of Christ.

Orson Scott Card, in Speaker for the Dead, suggests that "we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves". Those who are different than us, we fear, are lacking some essential part of being human. Sometimes church leadership fears the same thing: that we who are single are lacking some essential part of being Christian. They are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that we who are unmarried are in fact as Christian, as beloved by God, as themselves.

Perhaps this description sounds harsh. Don't get me wrong: Most church leaders in my acquaintance would, if ask directly, assure me that of course they believe single people have as much spiritual potential and receive as much love from Christ as married people do. Yet when they talk about the Christian life, what they say shows that within Christianity, marriage is normal; singleness, abnormal.

Let me give an example, the one that inspired this post: Just a few days ago I was sitting in a church service, and the speaker lamented the fact that fewer women were staying home to raise their children. He urged the women the congregation (many young college-aged women) to embrace their feminine roles, to accept with joy their calling to be wives and mothers and homemakers. This, he rhapsodized, was the central, God-ordained responsibility of women.

My main concern here is not actually how women choose to spend their lives, at home or at an office. Many women want nothing more than to marry and raise children, and even nonreligious women often prefer to stay home and raise their children. This is a personal decision, nothing more.

No, my main concern as this: So long as the church defines women's primary role as raising children and being keepers at home, there is no way for me, and other women like me, to be a healthy, growing Christian, at least not in the eyes of the church. Without a husband, without children, I necessarily fall short of the spiritual ideal that the church sets up.

This should not be.

In Christianity, under the New Covenant, the only standard is Christ, and we only walk with Him by His grace. This is the whole point of our faith: that we leave behind all the efforts and accomplishments we think make us holy, and, along with people from far, far different walks of life, turn humbly to Him.

Interestingly, when Christ walked among men, those who walked most closely with Him were often those who did not meet the Judaic standard for holiness: the Roman centurion, for instance, or the Phoenician woman. Yet it was these people, more than the Pharisees who did meet the religious standards for holiness, who were in fact the most like Christ, and the closest to Him.

My point here is this: As long as we insist on tying women's spiritual success to their abilities as wives and mothers, we set the bar for holiness impossibly high for singles. Yet according to Christianity, that bar should not even exist: What we are telling singles is in direct conflict with a gospel of grace.

Don't misunderstand me here: I'm absolutely certain that none of this flurry about standards and holiness and the Gospel occurred at all to the speaker I heard. I'm certain that his wish for women to joyfully embrace a life at home was made in good faith, from a good heart. He meant well.

Yet the fact that he meant well is all the more concerning. What it indicates is that he is entirely unaware of the distress that one comment may cause single people, that he does not realize that his vision of a holy life is impossible for singles. What it indicates is that this problem is widespread among the church, enough so to be (almost) invisible.

It is this invisibility which makes it so urgent that we the church talk about singleness: not so unhappy men and women can at last find life partners, but so that Christians, who also happen to be single, can be welcomed into the church, not only with a handshake and a smile but also with the way we talk about singleness. Let us be more like Christ, not laying extra burdens, impossible to bear on people, but lifting the burdens off and showing each other love.

#WhereWereYou?

Postmodernism has a bad rap.

At least in the evangelical church, people think "postmodernism" means "having no moral standards." Not true. Postmodernism is far more complex than that, and there is value (as well as danger) in it. The value lies in how postmodernism expresses truth: Whereas earlier philosophies expressed truth as a series of propositional statements and rational claims, postmodernism expressed truth as a story. It traded the "grand narrative" (a single, all-defining understanding of the world) for the "individual narrative" (the way one person sees the world), and then it asked individuals to start talking.

Incidentally, there is something deeply biblical about this: When Christ the Word came, He did not come as a series of propositional statements; He came as a human being and lived here, creating as he lived (as we do) a series of stories, a Story that shows God to us. In the story as well as in the propositional statement there is Truth.

Perhaps this is why, every year in early September, people tell their stories again. All day I've listened as people remember where they were on 9/11. My father can remember where he was when JFK was assassinated, and we remember where we were when the Towers fell. This, more than anything else, is the story that defines who we are as people, the world as we understand it now, and this understanding comes in a series of stories.

Like my father with JFK, I have my own story with 9/11:

I was sixteen, and since I was homeschooled, I was at home, working through my Bible curriculum with my mother. The phone rang, and my mother took the call. I heard her say, "Oh, it's worse than Oklahoma City, then?" She came back, told us of the attack, and said that we'd finish our schoolwork before we turned on the television.

So we did. By the time we turned on the television, both towers had fallen. We watched television for the rest of the morning - my mother, my younger sister, and I - even though the television is never on in our house. When my mother and sister left that afternoon to run an errand, I tried to do work, but I kept going back to the TV, kept turning it back on, kept watching until late that afternoon when everyone came home again.

I could leave you with something very philosophical, urge you to pay attention to people's stories because these define us. All I want to leave you with for tonight, though, is a poem.

This is a found poem - in other words, a poem in which many of the words and phrases are drawn from outside texts. The point of a found poem is to discover poetry in straightforward literatures, to turn something simply factual into something thought-provoking. I have taken my found poem from the stories that have been cropping up all day on Facebook under #wherewereyou and across the web. interwebs on the National Journal and the People Press.

I hope the poem makes you think. (As you read, keep in mind that I wrote this rather quickly this evening, so - be gracious.)

Liturgy

Psychologists babble about our

Public collective consciousness, but

All I know is, every year we

Tell our stories, tell them

Again –

Tell that we were in a 9 a.m. class, that

We were driving to work, driving to

School, we were getting a haircut, we were

Trapped – in a chair at the orthodontist’s.

Again we tell, we were in fourth grade, or

Tenth, we were starting our workday,

We were at our desk, we were

Exercising – in front of the TV.

Then someone called.

Father, sister, co-worker –

Someone called, someone said,

‘Turn the news on, we’re under attack.”

“It’s worse,” – “ worse than Oklahoma City.”

So we turned the news on, and now

We tell how we watched TV that

Beautiful fall day, watched all day saying

Nothing to nobody, and when someone

Turned the TV off, we turned it back on –

Again.

So we tell that we saw the South

Tower as it started to fall, saw

Rivers of people walking north,

Terrified business people – so many –

And we tell of doctors and nurses and

Gurneys lined up not moving, not talking –

Waiting. We tell of the sign on I-95, reading

“Avoid Lower Manhattan.”

So we were undone and

So we tell our stories – these

Broken cries, catechisms for

Those who come after, repeating

That we may pray, that we may

Pray in peace.

Argentina: Post 2

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton argues that Christianity is a faith of paradoxes, a faith (for instance) in which we both hate the world and yet love it enough to work for its salvation; in which we love the good things of this world and yet abstain out of gratitude for their existence.

I would like to add one more paradox: We who are Christians are to reach out to the needy with both physical aid and spiritual comfort; soul and body are equally important. 

This, in my experience, is not particularly well understood in the church today. Some (usually more politically liberal) believers emphasize the spiritual at the expense of the physical, putting great effort into helping people find food and clothing and housing but less into helping them walk with Christ. Other believers (a la Bob Jones University) are so terrified of slipping into the social gospel that they put all their effort into spiritual aid, none into physical aid.

(Incidentally, emphasizing the spiritual at the expense of the physical becomes an even greater problem when spiritual aid takes the form it did at Bob Jones: tracts and street evangelism and witnessing-to-random-strangers-or-the-hapless-priest-beside-you-on-the-airplane, as opposed to regular personal discipleship, encouragement, and care.)

I, in traveling through the Argentine Interior, went from ministry to ministry, from evangelists who concentrated on spiritual encouragement, to teachers who concentrated on physical aid. To see the various ministries, especially how one was different from the next, was to see how God cares for both the soul and body of his people.

As you know, our first stop was Tucuman, and there the evangelists emphasized - obviously - ministry to the soul. We spent an entire day in Tucuman, traveling for six hours from tiny village to tiny village to tiny village in northern Argentina, tucked away six miles along dirt roads so dusty we couldn't see more than five feet behind us, through the dust cloud the car kicked up. There, the evangelist Juan led the children in song and catechized them; he asked the adults about their walk with the Lord, made sure they were reading their Bible, made sure they had no images in their houses, stopped so we could hear their testimony - and then away we went to the next village, to repeat the process.

Juan and his family were themselves poor, wholly financially reliant on God (Indeed, Juan left a stable job thirty years ago to work as an itinerant evangelist). So there was no money to be offered, no physical assistance that could be provided. Yet the spiritual communion was enough. These people, who cooked over a wood fire, who lived a full day from the nearest village, whose cows wandered around with their ribs sticking out, were content with the spiritual comfort of the body of Christ.

This is the first half of the paradox, and (like all paradoxes), the first truth seems obvious enough that stating it is ridiculous: Our faith is a spiritual one, untouched by physical circumstances.  Whether we have great wealth or great poverty, Christ and His body the Church are the heart of our faith, and therefore, belong at the heart of ministry.

Yet Juan's ministry was very different from that in Brea Pozo. Where Juan has seen hundreds come to Christ over his thirty-year ministry, the school in Brea Pozo estimates that perhaps only one out of every five graduates from the school devotes their life to following the Lord.

Unfortunately, some believers would consider this a low success rate; they would wonder (to themselves, of course!) whether perhaps the ministry wasn't really worth it. When I was at Bob Jones, some chapel speakers would count with pride the many people they had witnessed to and seen converted over the years; the implication was clearly that those who were not responsible for so many conversions, or who were responsible for perhaps one or two only, were falling behind in their walk with the Lord.

Thankfully, this is not the attitude of the Brea Pozo school. There, they have no interest in counting up conversions like badges on their chest or medals on the wall. Do they wish more students would follow Christ? Absolutely. Do they consider their ministry worthwhile, even if many students are not saved? Absolutely. As we talked with the leaders over loose-leaf mat'e tea and the hard iced cookies popular as an afternoon snack, they reminded us that physical compassion, no less than tracts and preaching and singing, is a revelation of Christ to the world. It was Christ who loved us first, they explained, and so when they gave the children an education, a place to live, friends and strong adult role models, they were giving them the love of Christ.

This is the second part of the paradox: Regardless of "conversion rate" (how hideously mathematical to even think of it like that!), we as Christians are responsible to love the world as Christ loved us - and, since He did not bid people to "be warm and well-fed" without actually feeding them, to actually care for the physical needs of those around us.

True, Christ-centered care for others, whether they be in our church or not, believers or not, is equally concerned with soul and body; we are to rejoice in the sufficiency of our faith and spiritual encouragement even as we supply each other's physical needs, without attention to the spiritual realm.

Most of us, including me, are not currently missionaries, and so the temptation is to think that this paradox is of limited application. Not so. I can think of two possible applications:

First (and of the two, this was the one I most needed to learn): Do not despise those who minister to the soul and not the body. Perhaps because of listening to those braggart chapel speakers at Bob Jones, I am overcautious of ministries focused entirely on the spiritual. I imagine them sending people away to "be warm and well-fed", loading their arms with tracts but not a blanket or granola bar among them. This is what Tucuman symbolizes to me, then: While we as believers should not be insensitive to physical needs, we must also remember that our faith is pinned on another world, that this world, and all its suffering, pale to the treasures we have in Christ, that - most importantly - ministry is about exploring those treasures together.

Second, and equally important: Physical aid, in itself, is a legitimate ministry.  I found, this summer in my parents' house, a church magazine reminding conservative Christians that the social gospel is strictly replacing the Gospel with social aid; fear of slipping into the social gospel, he argued, should absolutely not prevent us from helping people. That this article was written and published tells me what I already knew: In conservative circles there is a distrust of ministries that can't tally up big numbers, or at least consistent numbers, of people saved. This should not be. Regardless of whether there are tracts involved, regardless of the numbers of people saved, any time spent helping people who need help is time spent being Christ who a world desperately in need of Him.

Ultimately, this is the paradox of Incarnation: Christ was and is and will be both God and man, having both a human body and spiritual power. In what can only be a faint echo of that we too are called to be invested in ministry that reaches body and soul, that finds sufficiency in spiritual encouragement but continually, generously assists with physical needs.

Argentina: Post 1

So. Last month I went to Argentina.

Some of you knew this already, and to those who were praying for me, I thank you. The purpose of the trip was a kind of cultural and missions adventure: During the first ten days, our five-person team helped at a Spanish-language ministry conference in Buenos Aires; during the second ten days, we traveled north, stopping to visit a variety of ministry projects along the way.

I plan to return to posting on singleness and the church, but before I do, I want to write a short series - maybe three or four posts - on my time in Argentina, the people I met there and the things that I learned. Since school starts next week, I want to start with something I learned about teaching.

Mosaic tile sidewalk in Brea Pozo

Our second stop on the trip north was Brea Pozo, a tiny village (perhaps 1300 people) tucked away in the arid Santiago del Estero Province. There's not much in Brea Pozo: a a few cows remarkable only for their protruding ribs, cactus plants shaped like trees, and lots and lots of wind - enough to create a sandstorm worthy of the Sahara Desert. The only other thing Brea Pozo is notable for is the rural community center it hosts: a Christian boarding school just outside the city limits. There, nearly two hundred students attend primary school (defined as kindergarten through seventh grade); of those, about fifty students live on campus.

To these students, the Brea Pozo school is a godsend. Poverty in Argentina, as in the United States, almost kills students' chances of a good education. Even students who live right across the street from the village school in Brea Pozo are sent a mile and a half down the road (and remember, most of these families don't own a car) to the Christian school. The problem of education is greater still for students who truly live in the country, up to fifty miles away from the school: Thanks to their isolation, these students would perhaps receive no education whatsoever were it not for the on-campus housing at Brea Pozo.

Yet there are more serious problems than education facing the rural poor in Argentina. Children raised in such deep poverty may also be raised by an abusive, alcoholic father. They may be raised by a mother who, for her livelihood, sells her body. They may be raised by a grandmother or an aunt so that their mother can work in town. In other words, the children who attend the Christian school come from badly-broken homes.

Having fun in Brea Pozo

Unsurprisingly, then, the Brea Pozo school includes in its student body a rather large number of what we would call at-risk students and what they call, all politically incorrect, troublemakers. By 'troublemakers' they do not simply mean students who don't turn in their homework. They mean students who sass the teachers - all the teachers - and students who burn down fields, students that the entire instructional staff has, at some point, wanted to dismiss from the school.

Yet these students are not, or are but rarely, actually dismissed. The school directors (a lovely married couple named Oscar and Susa) explained that as long as possible, whenever possible, the Brea Pozo school hangs onto these troublemakers, trying desperately to give them an education, to give them a safe environment, to teach them about Jesus.

Sometimes it doesn't work. But sometimes it does: One troublemaker raised in the Brea Pozo school later committed his life to Christ. Today he is leading a church and writing Spanish-language books about pressing church issues; we met him briefly at the Hispanic conference in Buenos Aires.

A teacher myself, I found this fascinating. As we sat around Oscar and Susa's kitchen table, I remembered the troublemakers in my classes, at least one a semester for as long as I have been teaching. These are the students who don't play well with others, who talk back to me in front of the entire class, who lie to me about what work they have and have not done. These are the students (I am ashamed to admit it) who I sometimes thought would be better off dismissed from the college, sent away because they were nothing but trouble.

I arrived taking pictures and completely
distracting the students in class.

Yet it is just these students that Oscar and Susa hang onto. "We are Christians," they explain. "The troublemakers may not come to Christ, but if we who are Christians do not take them in, who will?"

Good point.

It reminded me of something I heard earlier this summer. At the end of June, I spent a week in Cedar Falls at a workshop on teaching first-year college writing. There, the workshop director suggested that perhaps we stop complaining about how under-prepared our students were, that college instructors stop passing the buck back to the high school teachers and high school teachers stop passing the buck back to the middle school teachers. He told us, "You're the writing teacher, the expert in your field. Stop worrying about what their previous teacher did or did not teach them. You teach them."

That call to be the expert, to assume responsibility, was present in Oscar and Susa's school. In hanging onto the troublemakers, they sent a message to other Christian teachers: "You're the Christian, the expert in love and compassion. Show your students love and compassion."

Is that hard to do sometimes? Sure. But that's the point: As Jesus said, we all show love to people that are easy to love; we all show compassion to people who do not need to be showered with our compassion.

In Game of Thrones, the patriarch of the Stark family is asked by one of his sons, "How can a man be brave if he's afraid?" Ned Stark responds, "That is the only time a man can be brave."

Like bravery, the only time we can show love and compassion - really show them, as they were meant to be shown - is when we show them to those who do not deserve them.

Brea Pozo school buildings

That means the only time I am a loving, compassionate teacher is when I show that compassion to a student who perhaps did not deserve it but who needs it. The only time I can be a patient teacher is when I am working with a student who makes me impatient. The only time I can be merciful is when I am working with a student who has done something wrong.

I feel like Murphy's Law will come back to haunt me after I publish this post, that I'll somehow end up with an unusual number of troublemakers this semester because I am resolved to treat them with kindness, compassion and consistent love. Yet the point remains: Just as I am the expert in writing and so responsible to teach my students writing this year, so I am also, because of Christ, the expert in love and compassion and kindness and responsible to show all my students the love I received, regardless of whether they deserved it. Those who did not most did not deserve it are often those who need it most.

May the next semester be one of consistent grace and compassion in my classroom.

What We Say When We Talk About Chastity

I imagined this post, when I first conceived of it, to be a denunciation of the spiritual dangers lurking in books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye and When God Writes Your Love Story. Then talking with friends convinced me to scale back the tone of the piece, from accusatory prophet to a gentle warning against the spiritual unhealthy aspects of such books. Then time (short in part because I published something about singleness!) forced me to scale back still further: I want to get personal about these books, talk about how such books - written with such good intent! - may in fact push single believers further away from our gracious God.

Let me tell you a story.

Growing up, I was not particularly boy-crazy. I pulled my hair back into an unflattering ponytail until I was well into my teens, didn't wear make-up regularly until I was perhaps sixteen, and didn't discover that flat irons existed until I was in graduate school.

All this probably explains the unusual offer I received, late one night at a sleepover. I was about twelve, flat on my back on a mattress in the living room, sharing secrets with my friends at a sleepover. I don't remember what questions or discussion led up to it, but with perfect clarity I remember the offer: My friend, just a year older than me, offered to teach me how to flirt.

How to flirt? 

That's something I'm supposed to be learning? As in, good Christian girls actually try to flirt around guys?

(Also, this: Why in the world would anyone want to flirt? As I said, I was not boy-crazy.)

I kindly refused the offer, and conversation moved on to other topics. I recall feeling ever-so-slightly better, more spiritual than my friend. She flirted with boys. I did not. Even then, I was learning from the culture around me that extreme caution around young men was the way to follow God, and in my twelve-year-old mind I assumed likewise that to not flirt was to follow God.

I remember another evening, years later on the front porch of the church where youth group was held. Sitting there in the hot summer sun, my friends and I talked about first kisses. Romantic killjoy that I am, I interrupted the conversation with an announcement that I planned on never kissing until I was married, standing at the front of a church in a white dress and all. My friends, unsurprisingly, defended kissing before marriage, kissing before engagement, then went back to the more romantic conversations. I was left feeling ever-so-slightly superior to my friends, better off spiritually because I was reserving my first kiss for the altar. Christians, I knew, were called to purity, and I was better at purity.

At fifteen, of course, I wouldn't have put my thoughts in quite those terms, but that's what they boiled down to: Not flirting, not kissing - these things made me a better Christian, albeit a romantically challenged one.

In retrospect, what I thought made me a better Christian only made me a self-righteous prig, and it is that self-righteousness which is among the chief dangers (though by no means the most well-known) of so many evangelical books designed to teach readers how to stay pure before marriage, books in the vein of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and When God Writes Your Love Story. 

Before I go on, I need to clarify a few things.

First of all, books such as I Kissed Dating Goodbye are not all bad. In fact, I re-read Harris's book recently, and I was impressed by how he urged readers to behave in a way that helps others walk more closely with God. Mutual care and respect for our brothers and sisters in Christ is rare these days, and I appreciated his reminders.

Second, and more importantly, I still believe that within Christian theology, sex is to be reserved for marriage. It is therefore possible to write books urging readers to chastity without also falling into spiritual pitfalls (Lauren Winner's Real Sex is an excellent example of a book that manages this balance.)

Yet such books, written as they are to singles who are to remain chaste, link that chastity to pleasing God in a way that slides towards legalism, away from grace, and so runs the risk of turning those of us who are single and chaste into modern-day Pharisees. They run the risk of undermining all that singleness is meant to be.

In books such as Harris's and Eric and Leslie Ludy's, chastity is to be maintained through rigid personal standards, standards that please God. Harris, for instance, writes that "God is not impressed with my ability to stand up to sin. He's more impressed by the obedience I show when I run from it." (96). His point is clear: The way to impress God - an interesting choice of words, to say the least - is to flee from sin. In light of that fact, Harris urges his readers to accomplish that flight through a system of self-imposed boundaries and standards for maintaining sexual purity: "Set your standards too high," he tells readers. "You will never regret purity." (97).

On the one hand, I appreciate that Harris is reaffirming the importance of chastity. Even we Christians try to wriggle out of God's plan that sex is for marriage only, so the value that Harris places on purity is to be commended. My problem is not so much what Harris says but how he says it, not that he urges chastity (which is good) but that he urges chastity in a way that rings of legalism (which is bad).

Incidentally, although I use Harris's name throughout this essay, this is only because this essay began with a reference to his book; the problem is, unfortunately, not limited to Harris but spread throughout the evangelical church.

The evangelical church, as Harris says, believes that our moral purity impresses God. To say that we may impress God by running from sin (or really, by any behaviour whatsoever) is to step away from the gospel back towards legalism. We may be saved by grace, but we harbour a belief that we earn spiritual brownie points after salvation by our goodness; we think, and are taught to think, that we deserve some kind of gold star for not lying, not cheating, and for those of us who are single, by not having sex.

Within this system, it makes perfect sense for Harris to urge his readers to "set your standards too high". As long as spiritual life is a quest to impress God, then we will naturally be urged to prop up moral purity in whatever way we can, including imposing extra-biblical sanctions such as "No kissing," "No dating," or "No holding hands." Yet while we are told these these sanctions will promote holiness, all they really promote is self-righteousness; they drain us of spiritual energy without leading us closer to Christ.

The danger, for those of us who are long-term singles, is that people like Harris link our spiritual vitality and success as singles, not with the grace of Christ, but with our own success at maintaining not only chastity but also all those extra-biblical sanctions. Yet such sanctions actually threaten our spiritual vitality: Singleness is meant, like marriage, to draw us closer into communion with God, to make us more holy, yet to persist in certain behaviour patterns in an attempt to impress God is to defeat the purpose for which God designed singleness.

Don't get me wrong: Having standards, even ones that are not directly spelled out in the Bible, may well be a good thing. Think of those, for instance, who know that addiction runs in their family, and so they hold themselves to a standard of no alcohol. This is a wise personal standard. In fact, I Corinthians teaches that we ought to respect each other's standards, not urge people to violate their own standards.

Yet while we may feel that certain standards are useful in the cause of holiness, we are never told that the standards in themselves make us holier before God.  As St. Paul reminds the Corinthian church, "Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do" (8:8). To translate this to dating, we are no worse off if we do not kiss our boyfriend, and no better off if we do. Before and after salvation, we are impressive to God only in Christ.

Incidentally, I find it interesting that Harris emphasizes fleeing sin through standards. If this works, so be it; the Bible also instructs us to "flee sexual immorality." Yet in the Bible the point is not so much what we're running from as who we are running to: "Walk in the Spirit," St Paul tell us, "and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Whereas evangelical culture tells us to start sprinting away from sin, God tells us to start sprinting towards Him. The one race is a long and wearying one with nothing at its end; the other, a gentle walk with God Himself waiting for us at the end. This is the message that we should be giving to those who are single, and hearing if we are single: While we may choose to embrace certain standards, we do not stand or fall based on having those standards; we stand or fall in Christ alone.

And this is both more encouraging and more challenging: challenging, because walking with Christ involves all of life in a way that compartmentalized, narrow standards does not; encouraging, because we are loved and will not ruin ourselves beyond a point that grace can rescue us.

Lauren Winner, writing in Real Sex, points out that an over-emphasis on self-control and rigid sexual standards "perhaps fails to recognize that one resists strong bodily urges like sexual desires not primarily through willpower, but through grace." It is that grace which we as the body of Christ want to taste. Whether we are married or single, whether we are chaste or still working in that direction, our God will walk with us.

This is how the church needs to start talking about chastity: Ultimately, the single years are not meant to be a grit-your-teeth-and-bear-it chastity in an attempt to impress God, nor a series of escalating standards meant to secure His approval. They are indeed meant to make us holy (as marriage is also meant to make married people holy), but this happens not through our efforts but through the transformative grace of Christ. There is nothing to be proud of, nothing to be self-righteous about, nothing to boast about but Christ.

To close, let me return to my story: That self-righteousness of mine is, I think, a fair illustration of the dangers of linking high standards to success as chaste men or women. What success at chastity needs to be linked to is, of course, Christ alone. There's no reason to excuse sex before marriage, but there's also no reason to talk as if anything but Christ our sacrifice keeps us from sin and pleases God. Only in Him are we, married and single people alike, made whole.

All the Single Evangelicals

This weekend, a personal research project sent me back into some books that I hadn't read since I was a teenager: books about being single and preparing for marriage.

I remember thinking, as a teen, that these books were okay. As an adult, I had to keep myself from throwing the books across the room in frustration and anger. In the next few weeks, I hope to write a post identifying possible spiritual abuse in the books, but until that post, I want to write something for those who are like me, long-term singles.

Just this evening, I was talking with a single woman frustrated with her situation in the church. Just last week, a high school friend held a long online debate about the merits of singleness and those of marriage. Wherever I look in the church, single men and women are being pulled down by expectations that the evangelical world has about singleness and for singles.

I want to push back. I want to encourage my peers. So, to the single women and men out there, I say:

You are normal. Sometimes the church pretends that marriage is the norm, that God designed everyone, with the exception of a few random people, to be married eventually. Within the last two weeks, I have found people posting on the Internet that in God's plan for the world, marriage is normal; singleness (by implication) abnormal. But you are not abnormal! You are created by God and designed to be in this place of singleness, at this time. Your singleness is not something unusual. It does not catch our God by surprise. In fact, God designed singleness as much as He designed marriage: Eve may have been created so the first Adam would not be alone, but the second Adam lived more than thirty years as a single man on this world. Your singleness, just as much as marriage, is part of our loving Lord's good plan.

You are strong in Christ. Unfortunately, married people sometimes pretend that their lifestyle is more likely to produce strong believers than a single lifestyle does. Karen Swallow Prior and Marvin Olasky have both written that marriage is God's way to grow people up, to mature them quickly. Not so. David writes in the Psalms that in heaven or in hell or in the farthest parts of the earth he is still in the guiding, tender hand of his Father. You too, whether you be single-never-married or married or widowed or divorced, are in your Father's hand; He is bringing you closer to Him, and those who are married will not get there faster.

Even more importantly, your singleness is not a test that you have to pass before you are spiritually qualified for marriage. I have read authors (I'm looking at you, Eric and Leslie Ludy) that claim that the lonely single years are God's way of cleaning up the bad parts of your character. They imply that you will be married when you have matured enough. Guess what? They are lying. They are corrupting the wonderful truth that we are all - single and married - in Christ, and that every gift we have - including marriage and singleness - is a gracious and good gift from Him. You do not have to pass any test whatsoever to receive good gifts from God. You have received every gift abundantly and overflowing in God (see Romans 8.32), including your singleness.

That your singleness is a gift from God does not mean you have to be happy about it all the time. You do not need to plaster a smile on your face, be upbeat, tell everyone how much you are using these single years for God's sake. Sometimes our loving God assigns us a hard fate: Even His Own Son begged for something different. God is not going to be upset or surprised if you have days when you are discouraged or sad about your singleness; He will not think you are discontent, anymore than Jesus Christ in the Garden was discontent, when you ask Him to bring a spouse into your lives. Please, don't worry about being the perfect, content Christian single. Be honest. 

That includes being honest about not wanting marriage, if that be you. Unfortunately, our evangelical culture tries to convince us that everyone wants to get married, that marriage is the norm and not wanting it is a sign of being really weird. Not true. Some of us just aren't built with that desire; others will develop it only when someone special comes into their lives. Either way, it's okay. Be honest: Enjoying your singleness is worth so much more than pretending you really want a spouse.

On a related note, do not try to justify your singleness by extraordinary, draining acts of service. If all we have spiritually is from Christ, there is no need for you to work extra-hard as a single person to prove your spiritual wisdom and worth. You do not have to work yourself to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion; you do not have to ignore your needs and boundaries simply because there is not a family at home waiting for you. You can balance service and your human needs and still be using your singleness wisely. Sometimes, married people will tell me that singles have so much more time to serve God (or the community, or whatever). Not true. On your own, you earn a living, you balance the checkbook, you pay the bills, you schedule oil changes, you wash the laundry, you open the jar lids. You are both husband and wife in your household, and you are strong for carrying both burdens.

Concluding Thoughts

To the married people who are reading this: I don't want to imply that you are, by virtue of being married, contributing to singles' discouragement, that you are belittling singleness as opposed to marriage. Certainly not! You are our friends, our brothers and sisters in the Lord, and we value your friendships.

Yet in the end, I'm not really talking to married people in this post. I'm talking to fellow singles: Unfortunately, the church is sometimes abysmal at communicating its value of single people, and that has to change. Sticking up for women's rights is not a condemnation of men, so sticking up for singles is not a condemnation of marriage. It needs to be done: Whatever our evangelical culture says, singleness and singles, as well as marriage and married people, are valued in the eyes of God.

Let's remember.