Abstract
The concepts of sexuality and gender are, as Adrian Thatcher points out in the Introduction to his ambitious handbook, modern constructions. Sexuality, he says, is ‘invented and closely guarded by the medical and social sciences’ and gender comes to be studied ‘in a context of philosophy and social theory’, each of which ‘consciously eliminates’ the ‘master discourse’ previously established by (pre-modern) theology concerning God’s creation, the goods of marriage, and ‘the virtues of love and friendship’ (p. 5). Thus, in evaluating the perils and possibilities of these phenomena, ‘theology cannot be required merely to operate the chosen discourses of modernity’, and Thatcher expresses surprise ‘that Catholic and evangelical theologians alike are so much at home with this untheological vocabulary’ (p. 6). In these phrases, Thatcher expresses the general approach of many (though not all) of the authors of this volume: to create theological space for discourses that are not trapped by (very modern) notions of a person’s essential gender and sexuality. Rather, the essays aim to ask, in the words of Tina Beattie’s programmatic piece, ‘how our unique positioning within creation as “rational animals” made in the image of the relational, Trinitarian and Incarnate God enables us to navigate a creative path of limited and fragile freedom between the body’s grace and vulnerability, and the spirit’s capacity to liberate our bodies into love, or to surrender them to the enslavement of obsessive and destructive desires’ (p. 43). The collection succeeds in offering a comprehensive account of this type of revisionist-yet-theological approach to sexuality and gender, especially its British variant. However, in doing so, it unwittingly exemplifies its ultimate limitations.
While in his Introduction, Thatcher claims Tillich’s method of correlation as the approach of the volume as a whole (borne out by extensive chapters in a section on contributions to theology from other disciplines, including queer theory), in fact the essays are much more eclectic. Even the crucial three essays of the lead section on ‘methods’ by Elizabeth Stuart (on sexuality and theology), Beattie (gender and theology), and Eugene Rogers (doctrine and sexuality) display a quite unsystematic approach, drawing on many different frameworks. Stuart’s is driven by gender theory, and creates a fourfold typology of approaches. Beattie starts from a feminist theology still entrenched in a modern gender dualism and moves toward a postmodern feminism emphasizing the complexity of difference, embedded in a theology in which God’s grace ‘deconstructs the dualism’ (p. 47). Rogers recommends a creative ressourcement, rather than a strong commitment to either postmodern theory or theologies of liberation. Yet all tend toward the same conclusion as Thatcher’s correlational method: a theology more open and flexible—one might say less Victorian—toward sexuality and gender, while still remaining robustly theological. For example, Rogers’s chapter insists on the recovery (not rejection) of Scripture and tradition, as well as the careful use of ‘traditional Christology’ and Trinitarian theology, cautioning against too-easy appeals to ‘personal experience’. Yet the chapter rejects being ‘confined’ by a ‘compulsive complementarity’ of gender (p. 59) and advocates the extension of ‘the embodied discipline of marriage by which God may transform longing into charity’ to same-sex couples (p. 60).
Following these programmatic essays, the volume proceeds in several further sections, organized by the Wesleyan quadrilateral of theological sources. Articles are devoted to ‘reason’ (the aforementioned surveys of various other disciplines), Scripture, tradition, and the experience of various groups of people. Prior to the final section addressing the experiences of different groups, Thatcher inserts three further sections on controversies within various Christian churches, other religious traditions, and four essays devoted to ‘concepts and issues’ (this last seems an awkward grab-bag of essays on violence, pleasure, desire, and AIDS).
As in any collection of this sort, contributions vary in quality. Most are quite solid. A few are clearly one-sided and unbalanced in their treatment of the topic. For example, Margaret Kamitsuka’s essay on sexual pleasure remains trapped in a paradigm that simply celebrates sexual pleasure in reaction to past suspicion of it, and thus offers no sense that the challenges in the new context of a pornified society may have changed. Theodore Jennings’s essay on same-sex relations in the biblical world begins with a heading-level blast against ‘homophobic hermeneutics’ (p. 206), pursuing a single line of argument about texts with no attention to the many, respectable scholarly objections to his readings. Jennings’s one-sided analysis of Scripture contrasts especially with the much more balanced surveys presented by Ken Stone and William Loader in two other chapters.
In too many essays, one gets the sense that the choice facing the tradition is a stark either/or: either a very rigid conservatism, most often represented by Catholic magisterial documents and fundamentalist readings of scripture, or a revisionism that is strongly informed by theorists such as Foucault and Butler. But this vastly oversimplifies the existing discourse in Christian ethics. Definitive works on sexuality by relative moderates such as Lisa Sowle Cahill and David Matzko McCarthy are ignored, only receiving mention in a couple of the final chapters devoted to ‘family’. By contrast, Foucault has three full lines of page entries in the index, and Butler’s entry spills onto a fourth line. As Neil Messer, a molecular biologist and ethicist writing a chapter on contributions from biology, modestly but rightly notes, ‘I am struck by the contrast between the scientific voices with which this chapter has been concerned and those with which much contemporary writing on sex and gender seems to interact more comfortably, such as critical theories like Foucault, Butler, and those influenced by them’ (pp. 83–84).
The best essays in the collection are not controlled by these highly-contestable theories, even as they helpfully make the reader aware of overlooked complexity. Most of the historical essays are well-informed pieces that complexify our understanding of particular historical periods. For example, Marilyn McCord Adams offers a definitive and accessible chapter on Duns Scotus’s creative account of maleness and femaleness, one deeply affected by his convictions about Marian superiority, leading to a quite different account than the familiar Thomist one. John Witte’s chapter on the mainstream Protestant tradition admirably goes beyond a survey of big-name Reformers to explore the emergent natural law tradition in Enlightenment thinkers, which led to novel defenses of ‘traditional Western norms’ on grounds of ‘nature, reason, fairness, prudence’ and especially ‘because they worked’, not simply because of narrow scriptural readings (p. 318). While the essays treating contemporary conflicts within the churches betray a bit of a bias toward a progressive narrative of inevitable change, they are nevertheless informative of the basic frameworks and key events in the respective communities.
By contrast, the chapters which seek to do some kind of constructive theology are the ones which seem stuck in a forced choice between Foucault and fundamentalism, between a very broad inclusivism and a narrow authoritarianism. Margaret Robinson’s essay on bisexuality provides a clear example. She argues that bisexuals are ‘doubly marginalized’ from ‘mainstream Christianity’s rigid gender roles and compulsory heterosexuality, as well as from the triumphalism and biphobia of gay and lesbian theology’ (p. 649). Note that every evaluative word in this sentence is an implied argument about power, and the chapter does not go further than this critique in developing its view.
The narrowness of this oppression/liberation discourse creates a situation where some obvious topics are strikingly absent. Which topics? Messer’s detailed essay on biology, evolution, and genetics provides a fascinating example: for a biologist, the first question to ask about the whole spectrum of human sexuality is the obvious one about its relation to reproduction. Of course, Christian ethics should not seek to reduce sexual ethics to a dubious biologism. And yet one could read the four introductory chapters and imagine that discourse about sexuality and gender had absolutely nothing to do with human reproduction. Similarly, it is interesting that, in the final set of chapters on ‘sexual theories for all people’, there are chapters on premarital sexual couples, intersex persons, disabled persons—and not a chapter for vowed celibates. Apparently, this group is excluded from ‘all people’ despite its obviously important and complex place in the Christian tradition. This inattention to themes of reproduction and celibacy (neither of which are products of the detested modern dualisms) is an enormous and telling gap; the reader struggles to find any attempt to argue for these gaps. Thus, it is hard to understand apart from the seeming presumption that these topics aren’t able to provide what Thatcher’s method requires: ‘answers to very modern and pressing questions arising from the experience and study of sexuality and gender’ (pp. 4–5). But it would be nice if this supposed inability were made explicit and developed in more detail. While it goes beyond the scope of this review to argue for this, the most obvious explanation for these absences is that they would enormously complicate the endorsement of same-sex relationships, an endorsement which the collection mostly takes for granted.
A further question can be raised about this discourse: what is its ‘home’? Its agenda is clear enough: the inclusion of the experience of sexuality and gender beyond married couples with children. But what forms of settled cultural practice does it seek to authorize? It is not meant to authorize what Beattie calls ‘the gendered parodies of postmodern metrosexuals’ (p. 46). Rather, the collection identifies with spaces that neither fit the standard ideal nor the hedonistic metrosexual. Surely there are such spaces, and surely painting them all with the same brushstroke would lead to an inadequate sexual ethic, lacking particularly in mercy and accompaniment. But in the haste to include such spaces, a different question is left unexplored: can such spaces constitute a home for sexuality in the context of the Christian narrative? David McCarthy’s fundamental contention voiced 15 years ago in Sex and Love in the Home—that an account of the open, ecclesially-oriented household is needed to rescue sexual ethics from the private visions of personal satisfaction dominant in both liberal and conservative authors—is missing in this collection. The collection describes a sexual theology for a homeless world. To be fair, two of the concluding section’s chapters—addressed to ‘wives and husbands’ and to ‘families’—are excellent. Thatcher’s chapter on families is wide-ranging and well-informed, not falling into the dualistic trap as it engages positions such as Catholic personalism and Protestant critical familialism. Yet, even here, there are problems: Thatcher critiques Rodney Clapp for claiming that one’s ecclesial relationships should take precedence over family ties, wondering if Clapp will accept paying college tuition for any child in his church. But this problem of ‘the order of love’ is given attention in a whole chapter of McCarthy’s book, and it need not produce a supposed ‘ecclesiolatry’ (p. 602), as Thatcher too easily claims it does.
Thatcher asks in his family chapter: ‘is there a route beyond the polarization between the liberal embrace of all family forms and the more conservative insistence on a particular family form—based on marriage?’ (p. 602). And that’s really the question still unresolved by the constructive work in this volume. It captures the overall aim of this collection: a positive theology of sexuality and gender, one that seeks to make normative distinctions about sexuality and gender, but that is not simply founded on lifelong heterosexual marriage. The volume contains some of the best, most articulate advocates for such a destination. Even if one thinks that the project as presented here does not succeed, this is the place to engage it.