Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.2: Integrity and Self-Control

I want to spend some time focusing on one of the Christian virtue clusters we identified earlier. I labeled it as Integrity and self-control. Part of this cluster is purity, a very common word in the New Testament. We've often read this as being sexual purity, but there's no indication of that from the text. This makes more sense as the virtue of being only one thing, of consistency between your beliefs and actions. Hypocrisy would be opposed to this virtue.

The virtue of Integrity and self-control is only meaningful if there are boundaries on your actions that you choose to stay within. We build this virtue by acting in a fashion consistent with our statements of what is right and best, a fashion consistent with our ethics.

But where do we get such ethics? Since we reject legalism, are the other virtues the only source? No! We can create boundaries for ourselves. By living within those boundaries, and by constantly pushing ourselves to do better, we can develop the strength of character needed to resist temptation.

For example, I love cake. My wife's gluten-free lemon curd cake is one of the best things on the face of the earth. There's usually nothing morally wrong with me eating that cake, but circumstances are imaginable when it might be unkind or unloving for me to eat it. But it's such good cake! I might not have the strength of character to resist it!

The perfected me, the Christ-like me, would be able to resist that cake, perfectly, every day, forever. The me of today needs exercise to become the me that can resist temptation. So we put limits on our behavior to build the virtue of self-control, not to avoid sinful or unvirtuous actions today, but so we can become the kind of people who can avoid them in the future.

All this means that your self-created ethical boundaries must exist before the action that might challenge them. That means planning ahead for what situations you expect to put yourself in, and creating some idea of what limits you want to place on your own behavior. Think of it like an exercise plan; if you don't have goals, you can't achieve anything. And like an exercise plan, if you fail, you get back up and try again. Shame does not help.

But what if your goals are wrong? What if you create an ethic, and it just isn't working for you? Your circumstances have changed, you've changed, it's too easy, or you're constantly failing. You can't possibly be stuck with the same ethic you came up with thirty years ago, with no possibility of alteration. You need a means of amending your ethic, without abandoning it. You need a defined process for doing that. But you also can't just change your ethic too rapidly, or it may as well not exist.

My suggestion is, don't do any of this work alone. Find someone you trust to work through it with you. I would suggest someone disconnected from your personal life, perhaps a faith leader of some kind. Someone who won't be as easily swayed by your personal emotional reactions, and someone whose advice you respect and will voluntarily follow. Any change in your ethic should take at least a week, perhaps several weeks. In the meantime, not violating your prior ethic builds self-control.

A subset of all this is, of course, relationships and sex. In order to build the virtue of integrity and self-control within our relationships, we need to purposefully limit our behavior, and develop a relationship ethic. We'll talk about those in more detail later.