THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

'There are but two lessons for the Christian to learn: the one is to enjoy God in everything; the other is to enjoy every thing in God.'

Charles Simeon in Steve DeWitt, Eyes Wide Open: Enjoying God in Everything, p.3.

SEXUALITY

'Scripture is full of individuals and communities who do not know who they are until God reveals it to them. To insist on a theological premise for understanding sexual difference it to insist that we learn from this pattern and wait in trust that who we are in the sexual sphere is a datum that will come from God and nowhere else. Israel was was once not a people, but now called together by God, it is "a people" (1 Peter 2:10, alluding to Hos 1:9). Israel cannot know that it is a chosen people beloved by a faithful God, until it is told and its election is announced to it. At the individual level, biblical patriarchs, prophets and priests often resist their vocation until their true identity is forced upon them: Abraham, Jacob, Peter, and Paul do not know their true names until God renames them and reorients their lives.

For Christians, especially postmodern Christians bereft of any consensus, sexual difference is in a similar category. We will not know what it means until we allow God to tell us what it means. The tradition has claimed that we do not know who we are and what it means to find ourselves until we allow the premises and practices of revelation to unfold. In the tradition, stretching from Augustine to John Paul II, sexual difference is not mute, inert, nonexistent, or indifferent. In this tradition, God brings man to woman and tells the two sexes something that they would otherwise not know: that their creation is good, that their creation as two sexes is for the sake of enabling a church and covenant, and that despite their falleness, their twoness can in itself become a witness to reconciliation and redemption through marriage. Marriage gives this aspect of our creation the power to testify, and the nonmarried offer supporting testimony through their chastity, which creates the social ecology supporting marriage.'  

Christopher C Roberts, Creation & Covenant, p.247.

SEXUALITY

'Acceptance of traditional teaching with regard to sexual difference entails a certain asceticism. If sexual difference is so significant that it should be an organizing principle fior married life, then, as the revisionists point out, many men and women who want to marry will probably not, for their erotic desires do not appear to respond to the opposite sex. But like the young Augustine, revealed in Confessionum, many of these gays and lesbians will equally be unable to imagine a continent life. These people would appear to be trapped. The prospect of life without the embraces of those for whom they long strikes them as miserable and impossible, but a life without marital embraces is what the tradition appears to suggest. Are the churches prepared to insist that such a life is nevertheless necessary and redemptive? Where is the good news here?

It would not the the first time that, for the sake of the gospel, the church has insisted on renunciations that strike the culture as absurd. The rich man in Mark 10 "was shocked and went away grieving" when Jesus told him to share his many possessions. Are the contemporary romantics and revisionists, the gays and lesbians who want to marry perhaps a new version of the rich man? The revisionists speak for men and women who, like the young Augustine, are shocked and grieved at the prospect of forgoing certain erotic embraces. Could it be that expectations of erotic-fulfillment, an attitude of sexual entitlement, is a variation upon wealth, a new possession modern people grip so tightly that we cannot be whole-hearted followers of Christ? If so, the insisting upon a nuptial significance for sexual difference, a significance that would order ecclesial life into the twofold ranks of the continent and the married, would be a difficult thing to do, but it would be prophetic. As with the church's teaching on voluntary poverty, or other types of suffering, a language will have to be recovered, to the effect that there is freedom and joy in a life without those things the world calls necessary.'

Christopher C Roberts, Creation & Covenant, p.245.

SEXUALITY

'Sexual difference is the most primordial of the distinctions between different modes of being human, and it is the only distinction that implicates everyone. Humans can resent this distinction, and our life in this sphere can be marred by sin and imperfection, but, in the end, our own humanity depends upon finding ways of life that are premised on gratitude for it. To be what we are, we find ways of life that thank God for having made us male and female. To be fully human and follow Christ faithfully, there are many things we must do, but among them must be some sort of embrace of sexual difference.'

Christopher C Roberts, Creation & Covenant, p.237.

THEOLOGY

'...in theology, it often requires a debate before a doctrine is clarified and defined.'

Christopher C Roberts, Creation & Covenant, p.4.

LIBERALISM

'...the language of liberalism fails to engage on common terms with the communion of saints and the Lordship of Christ. Arguments about sexuality that dispense with the theological logic and that are premised on human autonomy and experience are incongrous in debates within the churches, even when glossed with appeals to justice or love, for such liberal arguments suggest that we can know ourselves sufficiently apart from revelation and doctrine, as if there were parts of life removed from God's grace, address, vocation, command, judgment, or teleology.'

Christopher C Roberts, Creation & Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage, p.3.

SUFFERING

'How firm a foundation, you saints of the Lord,
is laid for your faith in his excellent Word!
What more can he say than to you he has said,
to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?

"Fear not, I am with you, O be not dismayed;
for I am your God, and will still give you aid;
I'll strengthen you, help you, and cause you to stand,
upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

When through the deep waters I cause you to go,
the rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;
for I will be with you, your trouble to bless,
and sanctify to you your deepest distress.

When through fiery trials your pathway shall lie,
my grace, all sufficient, shall be your supply;
the flame shall not hurt you; I only design
your dross to consume and your gold to refine.

E'en down to old age all my people shall prove
my sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love;
and when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn,
like lambs they shall still in my bosom be borne.

The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to his foes;
that soul, though all hell shall endeavour to shake,
I'll never, no never, no never forsake."'

Anonymous in David Powlison, 'God's Grace and Your Sufferings' in Piper & Taylor (Ed.), Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, p.147.  

SEXUALITY

'Human sexuality reveals our incompleteness and provides the drive toward completeness, but this is a drive that finds expression in innumerable human activities. "The mystery of our sexuality is the mystery of our need to reach out to embrace others both physically and spiritually. Sexuality thus expresses God's intention that we find our authentic humanness in relationship." Indeed, although this drive toward bonding in community has its ground in human sexuality, its ultimate human expression resides in the bonding found in the eschatalogical coming together of the people of God. This is the end toward which human sexuality is findamentally orientated, and it is here that human community in its truest form will be fully realized. Rather than denying the essetial importance of human sexuality is the eschaton, then, this approach affirms that "the eschatalogical community is a realm in which sexuality - that is, the dynamic of finding one's personal incompleteness fulfilled through relationality - not only remains operative but operates on the highest level."' 

Marc Cortez, Theological Anthropology, p.66.  

SEXUALITY

'Sexuality, then, reveals an openess within the human person that can only be addressed by someone who is both "other" and "same." That an "other" is required can be seen in that Adam's need could not be met by himself alone. That the need be addressed by someone who is also the "same" as Adam is seen in the fact that niether God nor the other animals were suitable to serve as a counterpart for Adam. Thus, the sexual human being finds within itself a desire for another in whom there is both difference and identity.'

Marc Cortez, Theological Anthroplogy, p.65.  

IMAGE OF GOD

'First, the image of God is the task in which human persons serve as God's representatives by manifesting his presence in creation. Second, the image of God involves God creating and constituting humans as personal beings through whom he can manifest himself personally in creation. Third, the image of God involves the continual unfolding of God's personal being as he manifests himself in and through his covenantal relationships with his people, Israel and the Church. Putting these three elements together, then , the image of God can be understood as God manifesting his personal presence in creation through his covenental relationships with human persons, whom he has constituted as personal beings to serve as his representatives in creation and to whom he remains faithful despite their rejection of him.'

Marc Cortez, Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed, p.36.