All Things

Christ redeems all creation. He makes all things new. He reconciles all things to God. That language seems like it includes the very inanimate matter of creation.

Let's unpack that. Christ died at a particular place and time, and rose at another place and time. Relative to those events, at what point does, say, the Andromeda Galaxy become reconciled to God? That galaxy is so far away that it takes 2.5 million years for any information at all to travel there. How does God's reconciliation propagate throughout creation?

Does reconciliation propagate through organized information? I tend to think not, because that would mean we are the limiting factor on the work of God. God invites us to participate in his work, but he does not need us. The Andromeda Galaxy isn't unreconciled to God until some human gets there to fix it. Similarly, we would have to assume that the redemption doesn't propagate through matter at all, because I seriously doubt any matter from here ever makes it to Andromeda.

Does the redemption then propagate outward from first-century Judea at the speed of light? Well, no, because as the expansion of the universe accelerates, a (possibly infinite) portion of creation will have no contact with it. That's not really acceptable, unless we understand "all things" to mean "all observable things." Could the redemption propagate faster than light? God can do what God wants, but the problem then is that FTL travel is also time travel depending on your frame of reference. That would mean that from some frames of reference, the redemption arrived before the crucifixion!

Or perhaps God's reconciliation does not propagate at all, but instead affects all creation simultaneously, at the time of the death and resurrection of Christ? But we have a problem here, since the universe has no master clock; due to relativity, the way the universe actually is built and behaves, it's not even meaningful for an event to be simultaneous in all frames of reference.

When the reasoning process is this absurd, I am clearly asking the wrong question.

Reconciliation of creation to God isn't the causal result of any single event; instead, the crucifixion is a necessary aspect of the redemption of creation. If creation was not redeemed, the crucifixion could not and would not have been part of it; all possible reconciled creations include the crucifixion.

We have been reconciled. We are being reconciled. We hope to be reconciled. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen.

FAQ: Unforgivable Sinfulness

So there are quite a few Christian subreddits, and I try to follow as many of them as possible, and interact with them in whatever way seems beneficial. (Exceptions: I generally avoid /r/catholicism because it overwhelms my feed and I have little I can contribute due to their unique and complex teachings, and I got banned from /r/TrueChristian without explanation.) I maintain a custom feed of as many as seem practical. It's interesting how often certain questions come up.

One of those is the unforgivable sin. Obviously real theologians have spent quite some time exploring this idea, but I have some thoughts of my own. Perhaps they're of value. (Story of my blog.)

As we've seen previously, sinfulness is not in what you do, but in who you are; as Jesus said, a person who wants to commit adultery has a sin problem, even if they happen to not commit adultery today. Christ comes to cure our hardness of heart, not just to make our actions right.

With this model of sin, God isn't going to condemn you because you uttered the magic anti-spell; there's no combination of words that suddenly makes you beyond redemption. Instead, someone beyond redemption must be so because of what they would do given the particular circumstances, because of who they are inside. So what kind of person cannot be forgiven?

It's worth noting that this isn't the only time we see talk of something unforgivable. In Matthew 6 Jesus says that God will not forgive those who do not forgive others. But how might being an unforgiving person lead one to blaspheme the Spirit?

First, let's talk about what it is to forgive. When someone hurts me, they owe me a debt, and I can take revenge. Forgiveness is to choose to not take revenge, to cancel that debt. I can do this regardless of any remorse or repentance on their part.

This is distinct from reconciliation. Reconciliation is to restore relationship. This requires both parties to participate. Reconciliation is generally good, but may not be possible, for a lot of reasons, and in some cases may be dangerous or otherwise undesirable. One can forgive and still not pursue or desire reconciliation with the person who hurt you.

Now what does forgiveness in particular have to do with the work of the Spirit? We see that Jesus declares Peter and the other disciples to have revelation from God, to correctly discern and proclaim what things have been bound or released by God, which can perhaps be understood to mean forgiven or not forgiven. We see similar language after the resurrection: Jesus breathes on the eleven, tells them to receive the Holy Spirit, and that their proclamations of forgiveness or lack of forgiveness will be correct. This also seems related to Jesus's statement that the Spirit proves the world wrong concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment. One can conclude that part of the work of the Spirit, and thus our work as Christians, is to declare what is and is not forgiven.

So back to Matthew 6. We can break this passage down into a series of logical statements.

A: God forgives me.

B: I forgive others.

Not-B implies Not-A; if I do not forgive, I will not be forgiven. 

B implies A; if I forgive others, I will be forgiven.

Therefore two possible false statements can exist:

1) B and not A; God will not forgive those who forgive; forgiveness of others is, in fact, evil.

2) A and not B; there is some means of forgiveness from God that does not involve me forgiving those who sin against me.

Any such claims would necessarily also claim that the forgiveness proclamations of the Holy Spirit are incorrect, which also necessarily claims that the Holy Spirit is not from God. Thus, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

So getting back to virtue ethics, what kind of person would make a claim like this? What kind of person wants to claim God's forgiveness without being forgiving? 

Well, Jesus addresses this too. Immediately after Jesus tells the disciples they have the power to accurately proclaim what God does or does not forgive, Peter asks "how many times must I forgive my brother?" Jesus tells a parable, the servant whose GDP-sized debt is forgiven, but then shakes down others for the pocket change he is owed. This man is thrown into prison, never to be released.

An unforgivable person is the kind of person who is fully aware of everything that's been done for them, and it changes nothing for how they treat others. This person lacks most of the virtues we've identified: humility before God, drive for restorative justice in the world, love of neighbor, joy and gratitude, forgiveness and desire for reconciliation, patience, kindness and mercy and generosity. It's not what they do that isn't forgivable, it's who they are; the kind of person who won't become even a little more Christlike, no matter what God does for them.

Reconstructing Christian Ethics 05: Virtuous Systems

I've spent some time discussing what a virtuous person is, and what virtues a Christian strives to have. But what about systems? What about rules and laws and processes and states? Christ is the redeemer and judge of the world, not just the humans in it. So what does a virtuous system look like?

First, a system cannot be formed to be like Christ in the same way that a person can. A person makes choices, and the choices we make become easier every time, building and changing us from the inside. A system doesn't learn and grow in response to choices, so that process can't directly apply.

Like individual Christians, a Christian system would have to be identified based on its impact; by its fruit you shall know it. That leads to two questions.

First, impact on who? The people making the system? Surely not. This would imply that a law made by one person with good intent can be a Christian system, even if it does immense harm to millions of people. A system with bad fruit is a bad system. Presumably, the fruit of the system is its impact on the people affected by it.

Second, what sorts of fruit do we want? For example, if we could implement a policy that feeds all the hungry, that would be good (all other things being equal), but would it be necessarily a Christian system?

I say that would no more be a Christian system than a person feeding the poor is necessarily a Christian person. Christ had all sorts of things to say about people who looked good on the outside, but were hollow tombs inside. Just as individual Christian ethics are not consequentialist or rule-based, neither are Christian systemic ethics.

Instead, a Christian system would help individual people become more like Christ. By that reasoning, any Christian system is, almost by definition, part of the Church! But what does that look like?

People build virtues through their choices and actions. So a Christian system would train people to make the virtuous choice, even when it's hard. That means a Christian system is basically pastoring, and is almost by definition part of the Church.

Would a Christian system actually make it hard to do the right thing? No, there's no virtue in purposefully creating stumbling blocks. But it might identify natural cases where it's hard to do the right thing, and put the right people in positions to make those decisions.

So a Christian system would always be presenting people with moral choices, would determine which choices are harder than others, and would help people grow in the Christian virtues by putting appropriate people in places to make those various choices.

Side Issue 04.4: Safer Products

Another health-related issue is reducing your exposure to potential toxins.

If you're anything like me, you read that sentence and said "Toxins!? He's peddling new-age woo!" and your finger automatically tried to close the tab. I am absolutely not doing that. I'm talking about legit toxins, like arsenic, or chemicals that are known to disrupt endocrine function. You do not want this stuff in your body. So if you have the opportunity to reduce its presence in your environment, without much disruption to your life, you should seriously consider it.

Enter the Environmental Working Group, EWG. EWG has guides for nearly any product in your house, with a detailed analysis of the ingredients and their potential impacts on human biology.

Now, EWG's website is a little opaque. I usually just google something like EWG dishwasher detergent and get to the site that way. Be aware that brand loyalty doesn't help. A single brand might have a super-safe product right next to a not-so-safe product, even within different scents of the same product. You should drill down to the specific product and variety, every single time.

Now, EWG may grade based on things you don't care about. Maybe you don't mind asthma triggers, but are super-concerned about endocrine disruptors. Perfectly fair! EWG scores aren't the end-all-be-all, and I'm not saying a product that EWG grades with a D will kill you; there are some jobs only chlorine bleach will do. But still, it's good to know the options out there.

The other problem is that it's sometimes not trivial to actually obtain the products you find on EWG. I've made a list of what we buy regularly off Amazon, to save you some legwork.

• Hair products
• Shampoo
• Clarifying shampoo
• Conditioner
  
• Kids conditioner
• This stuff is amazing for tangly hair!
  
• Kids detangler
  
• Bar soaps
• EWG certified bar soaps are particularly hard to come by on Amazon, and they keep changing. There's one right now, but you may be better off going to your local Whole Foods or farmer's market and just buying something made by a local farmer. No guarantees that way, of course.
  
• Hand soaps
• We've started using Dr. Bronner's, in foaming dispensers. It works great, smells amazing, has a very low EWG score, and the foaming dispenser keeps small children from getting 10x too much soap.
  
• Dish soaps
• Better Life dish soap gets a B, while almost every Dawn product gets a D or F.
  
• Dishwasher detergent
• One particular variety of Seventh Generation dishwasher pods is easily available, gets an A for its ingredient content, and it being in a pod means you don't get exposed to it during use. Again, don't assume other Seventh Generation products also get good scores; some don't.
  
• Laundry detergent
• Biokleen Free and Clear works great, and gets a B from EWG. Compare to All Free and Clear, which gets a D.
  
• Toothpaste
• David's Natural is pretty expensive, but it's there. Also keep in mind that it's fluoride-free, so if you're particularly concerned about cavities, for you or for your children, maybe this is an area where you should keep using a fluoride product.
  
• Lip gloss
• Dr. Bronner's Naked gets a good score. So does Burt's Bees, but it's made with canola oil, so I'm avoiding it for that reason. This is another area where finding a local farmer's market may be more cost-effective.
  
• Sunscreen
• Metal-based sunscreens are much safer than chemical-based ones. Badger was the best one I could find on Amazon.
  
• Food Storage
• Try replacing your plastic food storage with glass or silicone or beeswax wraps
• Household cleaning
• Stop using bleach wipes! They don't really work that well, and they expose you to terrible chemicals. E-cloth works just as well, if not better.
  

Dr. Annie has tons of other great data-oriented experiments on other cleaning processes and products.

Another issue to pay attention to is makeup. Imagine how much of lipstick gets into the digestive tract and blood stream of the person wearing it. It sits on your mucus membranes for hours, right next to your mouth. You have to be consuming some of it, right? Unfortunately, I don't have any detailed recommendations here, but EWG has quite a database.

Side-Issue 04.3: Reconstructing Your Diet

Now I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent. I was planning to take up some ascetic practices to develop self-control along a few different axes, hoping to have some actual results before these posts went live. But due to health reasons, I've had self-control thrust upon me in the form of a thirteen-week elimination diet. So this isn't about my faith reconstruction, but since we're talking about food and self-denial, it seems like a good time to interject what I'm learning in that realm.

The standard American diet is awful. American health outcomes are terrible, and deteriorating rapidly. Christians aren't doing any better in this domain than anyone else. Perhaps we can combine a renewed commitment to fasting and self-denial with a renewed commitment to healthy eating. Build self-control by denying yourself delicious poisons! What's not to love?

But what is healthy eating, anyway? Sadly, there's not much hard science behind any general theory of human nutrition. We've been told for decades that we should all avoid eating fats, especially saturated fats, and probably also salt. We grew up with the food pyramid, telling us we should eat an entire loaf of bread every day. This is, of course, horrible advice.

It's truly embarrassing that we have no real idea of how to feed humans in a healthy fashion. Of all the things that one could prioritize figuring out, shouldn't that be at the top of the list? But if science isn't there, what we're left with is an unending stream of pop culture books and diet fads, with relatively little theory or hard data behind them beyond "Do this, it's natural!" There's Atkins, and paleo, and keto, and intermittent fasting variants, all of which seem to have some impact, but none of which agree with each other!

Enter Deep Nutrition. Hardcore biochemistry almost all the way through. (You may have to slog through the early chapters that spend way too much time talking about beauty. Trust me, the back half of the book is worth it.) My layman's summary is this:

• Some oils high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) tend to be extremely chemically reactive, decaying easily into free radicals that basically rip apart the chemical mechanisms of your body. This is especially true when heated for an extended period.
  
• What fats are high in PUFAs? Vegetable, corn, and canola oils, and a bunch of others, including margarine. Basically, anything that's completely artificial. You know, the healthy things we were all told to eat to avoid those animal fats! Remember how they banned transfats a couple decades ago? A bottle of canola oil is so reactive that by the time it reaches your shelf it's already 5% transfat. Imagine what happens when you put it in a deep fryer for a week at McDonald's!
• This doesn't even consider the chemical contaminants in these "healthy" oils, which are expressed by some really unpleasant means and aren't necessarily cleaned up all that well.
  
• Now check your convenience foods, cereals, breads, snacks. Almost all of them are made with vegetable oils! Once you start looking, you find that this poison is in almost everything we eat. There are exceptions, but you have to look pretty hard.
  
• We eat way too much omega-6 fatty acids, and not enough omega-3. This is largely related to our choices of fats, as well as our meat-raising practices.
• Good fixes include salmon and other seafood, spinach, flax seed, and chia seed. Grass-fed or pasture-raised meats or eggs may also be an improvement over conventional.
  
• Many other diets in the world do not have the bad health outcomes the American diet has. What are the healthy people eating that Americans are not?
• Meat cooked on the bone
• Organ meat
• Fermented and sprouted foods
• Raw foods

(Amusingly, perusing American fast food, the most likely place to get meat cooked on the bone or organ meat is KFC! If we could just talk them into using something besides vegetable oil to fry in, they might be the healthiest place around.)

Another widespread issue in the US is endocrine dysfunction. Diabetes is a form of this, and it's everywhere. Thyroid conditions are often undiagnosed, and may contribute to the increase in autism. Thyroid conditions can cause anxiety, body aches, low energy, depression, brain fog, PMS, and all sorts of other problems. I recommend reading more about this, or at least taking this quiz.

There's a reasonable argument that all these endocrine dysfunctions may be tied to autoimmune reactions to foods we eat. I understand that the hard scientific evidence is lacking, but that's okay. If you have these symptoms, first, go to a doctor to have your thyroid levels checked. Then, try an experiment: drop gluten for a couple weeks and just see if you feel better. If you do, great! If not, no harm done. If that doesn't help you, other foods that are generally recommended to drop experimentally include dairy, sugar, soy, alcohol, and caffeine. Caffeine in particular can be difficult, because many of us feel so bad we're dependent on the caffeine to function. So be gradual about it all and see if there are improvements.

And don't tell yourself any of this is a permanent lifestyle change. Consider it a temporary challenge. Do it for a day, then stop. Do it for two days, then stop. Have a final target of a few weeks. If the eliminated food is going to make you feel better, it's probably going to do it by then. If there aren't any improvements, and it's still a burden, give yourself permission to revert, at least partially.

So what can I actually eat that's free of these bad fats, also free of gluten, and aren't just giant piles of omega-6 acids? Here's a partial list of categories or specific products:

Snacks:

• Peanuts
• Pumpkin seeds
• Walnuts
  
• Cheese or cheese crisps
  
• Olives
• Bubbies fermented pickles
  
• Xochitl corn chips
  
• Boulder Canyon potato chips in olive or avocado oil 
• Sour cream makes an excellent dip 
• Siete grain-free chips
  
• Popcorn, homemade with peanut oil and real butter
• Asturi bruschettini
  

Drinks:

• Coffee with real cream, not fake creamer
• Whole milk, preferably organic grass-fed
  
• Matcha is an amazing coffee replacement if you're trying to cut down on caffeine
• Kombucha is excellent; bubbly, sweet, tart, probiotic
• If you don't like one version, try another, there are hundreds to pick from 
• Water, preferably spring water or reverse-osmosis filtered, with lemon
  
• Fluoride is a thyroid suppressant!
  

Breakfasts:

• Eggs with bacon or sausage
  
• Oatmeal
• Add chia, flax, coconut, peanut butter, preferably with sprouted oats
• Yogurt
• For single servings, Siggi's triple cream yogurt is amazing, texture like sour cream
• Any large tub of full-fat unflavored yogurt is a good choice too; add chia, flax, coconut, pomegranate, almonds, consider honey or jam to sweeten if needed
• Cereal is properly a dessert, but if you must eat it for breakfast...
  
• Regular Cheerios
• Qi'a is pretty fantastically healthy for a cereal
• If you don't care about gluten, most varieties of Special K lack dangerous oils and are quite tasty
  

Meals:

• It takes a lot of prep, but roasting a whole chicken, then throwing the bones in the slow cooker to make broth, is a great way to plan ahead. With that broth and chicken on hand you can throw together an amazing soup in under five minutes with whatever vegetables you've got in the fridge. And the best part: you get to eat fresh crispy chicken skin right out of the oven.
• Salmon is not cheap, but it's a great thing to include in your diet if you can.
• Sprouts are an excellent addition to salads, sandwiches, or anything else you can throw them on.
• California Pizza Kitchen frozen gluten-free Sicilian pizza is the best GF oil-free convenience pizza commonly available.
• Life Cuisine's frozen pizza-style cauliflower bowls are better than they have any right to be. Seriously.
• You can replace breads with corn tortillas, which are dirt cheap and very nice when heated in an oven or toaster
• Or you can just do without bread entirely. Really, did that peanut butter and jelly need to be on bread, or could you have just eaten it mixed in a bowl? Make that sandwich into something you eat with a fork or spoon, take the extra five minutes, and just sit down to eat it!
  

Dessert:

• The best dessert I've found is some very dark chocolate with Redi Whip and almonds. When I say dark, forget that Hershey dark chocolate, I mean at least 72% dark, preferably more like 90%. Dove Deepest Dark dark. It's very low sugar, high in fiber and antioxidants, and pairs wonderfully with the cream and almonds. Some coffee finishes it off beautifully.
  

Also, one thing that's sometimes tricky to work around is mayonnaise. Most commercial mayo is made with bad oils, even the stuff labeled "olive oil" is still mostly vegetable oil. The few brands of mayo we've found made with coconut or avocado oil are literally inedible; don't even bother. Making your own mayo with peanut oil takes some work, and can be tricky, but it's certainly doable. There's also a simple aoli that can be made with garlic and olive oil, but I haven't mastered that yet.

Salad dressing is another source of problem oils, but it's easier to work around. Olive oil and vinegar or lemon juice or vinegar makes an excellent dressing, better than anything I've had from a bottle. If you're looking for ranch dressing, just get the packet of mix, and follow the directions, but replace the mayo with full-fat unflavored yogurt, as much fat as you can get. Again, it's better than anything bottled.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 04.2: Resources on Fasting and Self-Denial

Part of what I've been advocating is a sort of asceticism, or mortification of the flesh. (Doesn't that sound awful?)  Many Christians have believed the flesh to be evil, worthy of punishment. That's not the position I hold; the body is part of us, and is only as good or evil as we make it be. Nor do I hold that suffering is good, in itself, or that self-denial can earn you points with God. Our goal is to become more like Christ, by building the Christian virtues.

As part of that, I've talked about one particular form of bodily self-denial: fasting. Fasting has a long tradition in Christianity. (Martin Luther's position on fasting seems to match mine rather closely.)  Christ fasted, in the tradition of Judaism. Indeed, all other major religions also practice fasting. I've been focusing on fasting, and more broadly about bodily self-denial, as a means to greater self-control. But fasting has many other benefits, both spiritually and physically!

Broadly, fasting can help lead to greater humility before God, deeper drive for righteousness and restorative justice (including repentance and lament), and the money you would have spent on food can be given instead as an act of kindness, mercy, and generosity. Fasters report feeling deep joy, and patience and endurance are surely also built by the practice.

If you want to learn about fasting as a spiritual discipline, I am not the expert for you. Fasting has never been part of my spiritual practice, though I'm more and more sure it should be. Instead, I can point you to these books:

• The Sacred Art of Fasting gives an overview of how fasting is practiced in every major religion, and the reasons and methods involved.
• The last chapter gives details on exactly how to fast, safely and effectively.
  
• Celebration of Discipline talks about fasting as one of the inward Christian spiritual disciplines, along with meditation, prayer, and study.
• Fullness of Life gives a deep historical overview of Christian asceticism, which was largely impenetrable to me as a non-academic, but which might be more valuable to others. I was able to appreciate the author's summary at the end of the requirements for any modern Christian asceticism to be successful:
• Recognize that the state of the body affects the state of the soul.
• Ascetic practices should be good for both the body and the soul.
• Ascetic practices should be temporary and targeted to some particular weakness.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 04.1: Mastering Bodily Impulses

What does mastering a bodily impulse look like? Like most things, it's a series of steps.

1) Understand what bodily impulses you have. These include, but are not limited to:

• Hunger and thirst
  
• Sexual satisfaction
• Comfort and rest
• Connection
• Input

Pick one that you want to build control over, either because it's a specific problem for you, or if you don't see a specific problem, just because improvement is always possible. 

Now, I want to make it very clear that I am not claiming this process will help anyone overcome actual medical addictions. If you have a medical condition, get medical help. Don't try to fight that alone, or with amateur help like mine.

2) Define the range of activities that can satisfy those impulses.

• Hunger and thirst
• Food and drink
  
• Sexual satisfaction
• Sex
• Masturbation, possibly including pornography or erotica
  
• Comfort and rest
• Sleep
• Relaxation 
• Hot showers
  
• Connection
• Personal visits
• Telephone calls
• Texting
• Social media
  
• Input
• Movies and shwws
• Reading
• Games
• Music
• Noise

3) Define your baseline. How are you presently satisfying this impulse? In what manners? How often? For how long? To what degree? Are you eating three large meals every day? Are you spending two hours a day on social media? Taking a long hot shower every night? You need measurements, or you can't know that you're succeeding or failing. Be honest, or there's no point. Remember, nobody is judging you here.

4) Define your restriction. Develop a clear plan to regularly pull back from your baseline. Have a final goal, but start small. If you want to restrict your eating, maybe pick one meal, one twelve hour period a week, to eat something small, simple and cheap without any frills, like a very poor person would have. If you want to restrict your sleep, pick one day a week to get up half an hour early. Work up from there toward your final goal.

These practices can be taken to unhealthy extremes, especially fasting, so don't do anything dangerous. Most bodies can go for several days without food, but your particular body might not. Risking your safety is contrary to what you're trying to achieve. Don't give up medications or vitamins!

5) Track success and failure. There can be no shame in this process! Shame makes you lie, and then you may as well just not do it. Own your failures, do better tomorrow, and try a different way to succeed. If your goal is self-control over your sleep, but you keep sleeping in, try a different alarm type, or a different way of sleeping, or drinking a huge glass of water before bed.

Also, be aware of failures in other ways. If you've given up smoking as much, but are now angry all the time, that doesn't mean you've failed, but it does mean you have more work to do.

6) Adjust the restriction as needed. If you're consistently succeeding, try something a little harder. Abstain for longer periods, or more often, or in new ways. If you've hit your restriction goal, but you've developed a secondary problem, work on the secondary problem before increasing your restriction.

If you're consistently failing, change the rule to be still a form of self-denial, but something more achievable. Be creative about what this looks like. Maybe instead of giving up desserts one day a week, you give them up for just two hours after dinner. Or maybe you give up all other sweets except dessert.

If you've hit your final goal, without developing additional problems, congratulations! Keep on your restriction for a while, then return to step 1 and pick a new impulse to learn to control, in parallel to your first one.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 04: Self-Control and Bodily Impulses

One aspect of  Integrity and self-control is subduing bodily impulses. What bodily impulses? The obvious ones are eating and sex, but there are definitely other things where our body pushes us in one direction or another. We need an appropriate Christian responses to all these impulses. But before we talk about that, we need to address some basic assumptions.

First, bodily impulses are morally neutral. In purity culture, one implied message was that male sexual arousal was a moral evil, one that females were somehow responsible for protecting us from. (Female sexual arousal, on the other hand, may as well have not existed.) Everything about this is wrong! We are mammals, God made us to want sex, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Augustine was just full of crap on this one.

But wait, aren't we commanded to avoid lust? Well, lust is not sexual desire! Lust is longing for anything that doesn't belong to you. Sexual arousal is a thing that happens to you. Lust is a regular thought process, a thing you do. It is opposed to the virtue we identified as Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude. I've also heard it said that lust for a person objectifies them, in opposition to the virtue of Love and respect.

Second, bodily pleasures are morally neutral. The taste of sugar, the feel of an orgasm, or a good sleep-in, are not to be avoided in themselves. It is details and context that make these pleasures virtuous or not. We cannot conclude that all Christians are required to permanently abstain from a bodily pleasure. Some are certainly called to such, but to apply it to everyone is a burden that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear. We reject the idea that full-scale lifelong asceticism is the most virtuous possible path. 

Third, bodily impulses can control us. I'm often reminded of how an acquaintance once described her first experience of sexual intercourse, which I'm sure is the story of a hundred million other people. She had been raised to believe sex before marriage was to be avoided, and so she and her boyfriend were maintaining technical virginity, while engaging in ever-increasing degrees of sexual intimacy. But "your body takes over" and they found they were having sex without any conscious choice to do so. There may be ways to have God-honoring sex outside marriage, but losing control of your body is not among them.

Addiction is another obvious (and more medically serious) example of a controlling bodily impulse, but there are many others we don't talk about as much. How many people struggle to resist food, or can't get out of bed on time, or just can't stop talking to their friends? How many can't control their temper, or overcome their fear? All of these are bodily impulses that can overcome our choices, make us do the things we do not want. It is not we that do them, but sin living in us.

Fourth, we can and should master our bodily impulses. Like we said before. eating cake itself is morally neutral, but the inability to abstain from cake is a failing of character. We strive to grow into the perfection of Christ; the perfected me could choose to never eat cake again, and make it stick. Again, permanent rejection of a bodily pleasure is not a goal we're interested in, and obviously we can't do without food or sleep forever. But temporary abstention, such as fasting, builds endurance, and can help us distinguish between the things we really want and the things our body is driving us towards. 

What does mastering our bodily impulses actually look like? Next time.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 03.4: Christian Sex Education

We all worry about teens running around having unrestricted sex. The impulse toward sex is strong, or we wouldn't be having this conversation. We cannot control our half-grown children, any more than we can control another adult. 

So what do we tell them?

Well, first, we teach them the Christian virtues. If we're not doing that, I'm not sure why we're worried about anything else. The converse is that we do not teach any lists of rules, except as a temporary measure before they're able to process the virtues those temporary rules derived from.

Second, we teach them facts. Not all at once, and not at an age that they can't yet properly contextualize something. But we withhold nothing. Anatomy, physiology, puberty, pregnancy, sexual arousal, everything. Drawings, photographs, there should be no mysteries left about the isolated human body at all, at least from an intellectual standpoint.

Conversely, we do not teach lies. If you can't support it from science or scripture or experience, don't teach it. Especially do not teach things just because you heard them from your teachers or parents. There are so many lies floating around in this space that you should verify everything you can, and reconsider who you trust to give you good information.

Third, we teach them what actions are possible, what choices they have. This includes sexual interaction in all its variety, self-stimulation, birth control, and other safe sex practices. It also means teaching them what lies are out there, like those spread by pornography, and how to process them if they're encountered.

Fourth, we tie it all together. How do you use the virtues to decide what choices are better than others? That means, among many other things, how to deal with sexual arousal in a healthy fashion, including developing self-control in that arena. It also means teaching basic relationship ethics. One good way to do that is to go over scenarios, lots of scenarios, in detail. Consider possible responses to each scenario, and the virtues or vices of each possible response.

This may also mean helping them develop a preliminary ethic, perhaps a very vague one from one of several possible starting points. More important is the process for filling in the details and modifying it over time. By helping them developing a relationship ethic early, with a clear head, not under the hormonal pressure of being in a relationship, we give them a way to distinguish between their hormones and their conscious choices. Again, we help them learn self-control.

Fifth, we make it possible to learn more. Books are good. Open dialog is better. Sex pervades all forms of media, and being able to distinguish between realistic messages and unrealistic ones is a skill young people cannot learn in a vacuum. Some sort of filtered search engine or online Q/A system could be  incredibly beneficial. And in some contexts, there could imaginably be a place for explicit instructional videos and photographs. (The prudish part of me is still WTFing at that idea, but if there's anything morally questionable about that idea, I can't find it.)

There are a couple of comprehensive Christian sex ed curricula out there. (Presumably without instructional videos.) I have no details about the contents, but they seem to be well-regarded.

These Are Our Bodies (Episcopal Church)

Our Whole Lives (United Churches of Christ)

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 03.3: Homosexuality

So in this Christian, scriptural virtue-based ethical framework, what do we do with the verses about homosexuality?

First, we need to be clear about what proposition we're even talking about. Christians broadly fall into three camps on this issue. The sides below are not my terminology, but they are my attempts at definitions.

Side A: God has no objection to either people who experience same-sex attraction, nor to the action of two people of the same sex having sex, at least in some contexts.

Side B: God has no objection to people who experience same-sex attraction, but does object to the action of two people of the same sex having sex in any context. Non-straight persons should remain celibate.

Side X: Experience of same-sex attraction is sinful. Non-straight people can and should change their sexual orientation, or should be excluded from the Church in all capacities.

I'm just going to say outright that the ideas of Side X are completely disconnected from objective reality. All truth is God's truth, and one way to determine that truth is by science and observation. Looking at the world, we see that people cannot change their sexual orientation, and that attempts to that end are often or universally harmful. Sexual orientation is a fixed aspect of someone's created personality, and God will not exclude for such reasons. If you want someone willing to entertain the notion that God hates anyone, or wants anyone excluded from the Church, you're reading the wrong writer. And if anyone has told you anything like that, they were not preaching Christ to you. Find another preacher.

The difference between Side A and Side B is largely the question of whether God objects to two people of the same sex having sex in all contexts. It's entirely about actions, not about desires. There's a spectrum of teachings in various churches about this. Many evangelical churches would describe themselves as Side B, but in practice there's a lot of Side X actions mixed in. The shame involved is often literally unbearable. Take a look at the suicide rate among LGBT+ youth in the Church, and tell me the teachings of the Church on this subject are a tree that bears good fruit. We, as a Church, need to take a very close look at what we're teaching on this subject. Anything that makes any person, especially a child, feel less than loved and wanted by God? That is blasphemy.

But let's pretend that doesn't matter and act for a moment like we're legalists. What does the Bible say about this matter?

There are about half a dozen passages talking about homosexual sex in the Bible. There are a few in the Old Testament. (Recall: that part of the Bible which we completely reject as binding on Christians.) And then there are a few verses in the New Testament, in the writings of Paul. Nowhere is it a major subject, by any means. But we'll walk through these verses, and I'll explain why I no longer find them convincing.

(To be clear, David Gushee does this vastly better than I do, in his book Changing Our Mind.)

Now, before we get into those verse-by-verse, I want to point out something: every single one of these references is explicitly about two men having sex. In the entire Bible, the only verse that can be construed as talking about two women having sex is in Romans 1:26. "...for their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones..." And that's it.

Now, it's not at all clear that this is intended to be a blanket condemnation of the idea of two women having sex; it definitely could be, but it could also be about a dozen other things. But even if it is a blanket universal condemnation, let's think about the implications of that. There's no mention of lesbian sex in the entire Old Testament! I mean, how could there be? In their context, sex was a thing a male did to someone; two women having sex was linguistic nonsense.

But then, what are we to make of this? If Romans 1:26 is really a verse we should interpret to mean "God universally objects to two women having sex," then we also have to conclude that God was perfectly okay with Jewish lesbians for 1,500 years, before finally telling them to knock it off, very obliquely, in a letter Paul wrote to non-Jewish Christians in Rome.

This proposal is improbable to the point it does not bear further discussion.

Based on this, I think we can reasonably say that any prohibition of female-female sex is man-made, once again elevating the teachings of man to the level of scripture. Interestingly, a second-century parabiblical book called the Apocalypse of Peter references lesbians being condemned to eternal torment. So while man-made, it's not exactly new. (AoP is also the earliest reference we have to hell as a place of eternal conscious torment, also a man-made idea that's not in scripture.)

Now, I've never heard anyone actually argue that God is fine with lesbianism, but still objects to male homosexual sex. But it's at least an imaginable argument, so I'm going to work through the scriptures anyway. Remember, we're trying to answer "Does God clearly object to male-male sex in all cases?"

So where do the objections start? Sodom, where the men of the condemned city tried to rape Lot's angelic visitors. Since we're testing whether God condemns consensual male homosexual relationships, a story about rape has no bearing on that point. That should shut down the usefulness of Sodom right there. But even beyond that, the sin of Sodom is discussed multiple times elsewhere in scripture, and nowhere is the cause of their destruction called out as homosexual sex. And ignoring that, if the primary sin of Sodom is the homosexual part, the implication is that if they'd been gang-raping female visitors, God would have objected to that less. Really? Using this as some sort of proof text against homosexual sex just falls apart at even the slightest examination. It's kind of embarrassing.

Next, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, a crime/punishment pairing. 18:22 says "And with a male you shall not lay [as the] lyings of a woman." (Ancient Hebrew is awful. The Septuagint Greek translation is basically the same thing.) This is usually translated as "You shall not lie with a male in the manner of a female." But consider that it could also be translated "You shall not lie with a husband in the bed of a wife." Or more clearly, "You (a man) should not have sex with a man who is married to a woman." In a culture where sex with with another man might not necessarily be considered cheating on your wife, having it called out explicitly as a form of adultery might make sense. Either way, even if we accepted the Old Testament as binding, which we do not, the meaning of this passage is not clear.

And that's it for the Old Testament. This really doesn't get talked about much.

In the New Testament, we get three passages from Paul, all of which are ambiguous.

Romans 1 (New English Translation):

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for an image resembling mortal human beings or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to dishonor their bodies among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones, and likewise the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed in their passions for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Now, this is clearly talking about two men having sex. But it may be talking about two men having sex in the context of pagan worship. Even if it's not that, it could very well be a reference to the pervasive rape culture of the first century Roman world, where a man could rape anyone below him in the social order, but was subject to rape by those above him.

Can we interpret Romans 1 as a blanket condemnation of male-male sex in all cases? I don't see how.

Then we get to the really interesting ones. Paul throws a couple references to homosexual sex into a couple of his sin lists, without further elaboration. 1 Corinthians 6 includes μαλακός/malakos and ἀρσενοκοίτης/arsenokoitēs. 1 Timothy 1 also includes arsenokoitēs. These are the words usually translated into English as some variant of "practicing homosexual."

Malakos is literally something like "soft." Some Bibles translate it as "effeminate," other times it gets lumped in as a variant of homosexual partner. It's not used anywhere else in the New Testament except to anti-describe John the Baptist's clothing in Matthew 11:8. Other Greek sources treat it as something more like moral softness. So this word isn't doing much heavy lifting for telling us what's considered right or wrong here.

Now, the word arsenokoitēs seems straightforward at first. It's a combination of two Greek words, and pretty clearly means "male-bedders." This is definitely about male-male sex, at least some subset of it.

But when you dig further, this word is fascinating, because we have no record of it prior to Paul using it in 1 Corinthians. There might be one usage roughly contemporary to Paul, also by a Greek-speaking Jew, in a list of economic wrongdoing. If you look at the Septuagint, the standard Greek translation of the Old Testament that Paul would have known, those verses in Leviticus are translated into Greek using arseno koitēs. It looks for all the world like Jews made this word up, expressly to reference Leviticus!

Now, why would they do this? There were many common Greek words they could have used to reference homosexual sex. And Paul is well-educated. He's not writing these letters to introduce new concepts to his readers; he's reminding them of conversations they've already had in person. He's not using a rare Jewish-Greek word because he doesn't know any other. He's got to be purposefully referencing some subset of male-male sex that standard Greek didn't have a specific word for.

There's all sorts of deeper academic discussions about this available. But I'm at this point very comfortable saying that Paul's usage in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy does not constitute a compelling case for universal condemnation of male-male sex.

And then there's the argument from Jesus teachings on divorce. Mark 10:

Then Jesus left that place and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan River. Again crowds gathered to him, and again, as was his custom, he taught them. Then some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “He wrote this commandment for you because of your hard hearts. But from the beginning of creation he made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Here the Pharisees reference Deuteronomy 24, and ask Jesus to take sides in one of their religious disputes. Jesus quotes Genesis to them, saying that marriage is always intended to be permanent, and divorce was never God's intent. He never starts saying "Oh, divorce is okay in these circumstances, but not these other circumstances." He restates the problem, but expects those involved to figure out the solution.

Now, the reasoning here goes something like this:

• Jesus referenced Genesis as a standard for marriage and divorce
• Therefore, all marriages should be like that of Adam and Eve
• Adam and Eve were heterosexual
• Therefore, two people of the same sex cannot be married
• A separate argument concludes that sex should only exist within the confines of marriage
• Therefore, two people of the same sex should not have sex
  

(If I'm missing a step here, I'm not purposefully trying to set up a strawman. Let me know.)

First, I just object to the idea that we can take Jesus statements about divorce and apply them to a very different subject. That's not respecting his words. Jesus said what he meant. You do not get to bend his words to apply to something else. "No, no, what he actually meant was, 'Blessed are the makers and purveyors of all dairy products!"

But it gets worse. This argument structure can be made to mean basically anything you want. As a source of moral dictates, it is inherently not compelling. For example, similar logic goes like this:

• Jesus referenced Genesis as a standard for marriage
• Therefore, all marriages should be like that of Adam and Eve
• Adam and Eve were commanded to multiply
  
• Therefore, married couples should not use contraception

(It should surprise nobody that I don't subscribe to this argument.)

Or consider this example:

• Jesus referenced Genesis as a standard for marriage
• Therefore, all marriages should be like that of Adam and Eve
• Adam and Eve were naked vegetarians
  
• Therefore, married couples should not eat meat or wear clothes
  

Still, for the sake of argument, suppose we assume that Genesis 2 should be our guide for choosing between Side A and Side B. Side B says we should look at the story, and understand that all marriages should be heterosexual. This is clearly a man-made inference and not in the text at all, but okay, let's explore the implications of that.

Since Jesus references Genesis 2 as a standard for marriage, we must conclude that Genesis 2 does refer to marriage, and not some sort of non-marriage companionship. God saw that it was not good for man to be without a suitable marriage partner. So either:

1. God wants homosexual persons to remain without a suitable marriage partner. The clear statement of God that it is not good for man to be alone, and the statements by Jesus that avoiding marriage is only given to a few, is simply not applicable to gay people.
   
2. God wants homosexual persons to have a suitable marriage partner, of the opposite sex. Simple observations of how this works out in practice puts this under "no good tree bears bad fruit."
   
3. God wants homosexual persons to have a suitable marriage partner of the same sex, just... without the sex. This would be a very odd definition of marriage to extract from a very tortured connection of ambiguous scriptures. And it would also mean one can't actually be opposed to gay marriage, in itself.
   

Now, consider this argument from Genesis 2:

• Jesus referenced Genesis as a standard for marriage
• Therefore, all marriages should be like that of Adam and Eve
• Adam and Eve were commanded to be fruitful
• Some people, due to the details of their brain structure, cannot be fruitful in a heterosexual relationship, but can be fruitful in a homosexual relationship
• Therefore, two people of the same sex can have a fruitful relationship in the same sense that Adam and Eve did
  

One could still try to strain out smaller and smaller gnats. One could try to parse out what it is to be fruitful. (Not a bad idea in itself, perhaps.) But we are going to far down this rabbit hole that we can't even see daylight any more. If this is an argument you expect other people to find convincing, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.

There is no clear indication in scripture that sex between two people of the same sex is generally condemned. Neither shall I condemn it.