In the first post in this series, I claimed that Rowan Williams’ purpose in ‘The Body’s grace’ was to ask what the connection was between sex and the gospel. In the second post, I pointed to the brief sketch he gives in the lecture of the content of that gospel. That gospel, in Williams’ view, has to do with the good news that God freely loves us, and that God’s love calls us to (and frees us for) love of God. It also has to do with the ‘fellowship of Christ’s body’, in which we learn of God’s love for us, and in which we communicate God’s love for others.
Asking how sex relates to this gospel therefore means two things.
- Williams’ concern is above all with the connection of sex to sanctification – to the processes by which people are, by the grace of God, drawn into holiness. Holiness is a matter of being called out of, and freed from, all that stands against the love of God. It is a matter of being called to, and freed for, that love. It is a matter of being crucified, and of being raised to new life in Christ. ‘Holiness’ is, in Williams’ theology, a fundamentally dynamic category: to ask about holiness is to ask about whether a particular path leads deeper into the love of God, or leads away. Luther defined sin as a matter of being ‘curved in on oneself’ (incurvatus in se): a matter of being so focused on one’s own gain that the gifts of God (and even God Godself) are turned into objects subordinated to that purpose. Holiness is a matter of being untwisted from this sinfulness, and opened up to worship: to an outward-facing delight on God’s gifts and on God’s self. Williams does not use the language of ‘sin’ or ‘holiness’ in the lecture – quite deliberately, I suspect, in view of the fact that it is so easy to assume that we know what these terms mean in the realm of sexuality – but the concepts he uses here to describe sexual relationships are the ones that he elsewhere uses to describe the whole Christian life as a life of growth towards God. ‘The Body’s Grace’ would not, for instance, be out of place as an appendix to Williams’ The Wound of Knowledege.
- Williams concern is also fundamentally ecclesial. One could say that the question of Christian ethics is, ‘Does this build up the body?’ or ‘What makes this body more the body of Christ?’ To ask about the connection between sex and the gospel is to ask about the role of sexual relationships in the formation of the body of Christ – that body in which we learn of God’s love for us, and communicate God’s love for others. One (possibly surprising) way to get a grips with this aspect of Williams’ lecture is to notice his talk about communication (as when he says, for instance, that ‘the moral question … ought to be one of how much we want our sexual activity to communicate’), and mentally to translate it into Barthian terms. Barth opens his Church Dogmatics by saying:
The Church confesses God as it talks about God. It does so first by its existence in the action of each individual believer… But as it confesses God the Church also confesses both the humanity and the responsibility of its action. It realises that it is exposed to fierce temptation as it speaks of God, and it realises that it must give an account to God for the way in which it speaks. (CD I/1, p.3, emphasis mine.)
Williams’ lecture draws sexuality firmly into this realm: it too is part of that ‘action of each individual believer’ that ‘talks about God’. Williams’ question is not simply whether our sexual activity somehow conforms to or obeys the gospel, but whether in our sexual relationships we proclaim that gospel.
One of the claims of the lecture is that sex is not a topic we can ignore or treat casually, nor is it an aspect of our lives that we can easily tidy away, or ‘get right’ and then ignore. And that is not because Williams has bought some post-Freudian picture where everything is really about sex, but because he sees that sex is caught up in powerful and complicated ways in these matters of sanctification and proclamation – and those are the most serious games in town.
Recent Comments