Reframing Paul on sexual ethics, part II

What if sexual ethics are about being whole in Jesus?

Gentle reader,

I hope the beginning of the season of Ordinary Time is full, for you, of ordinary glory.

Last week, in my first piece on reframing Paul on sexual ethics, I argued that Paul stands in fundamental continuity with Jesus, his ethics being rooted in a Jewish framework in which humans are to be treated as dignified image bearers. I also argued that Paul should not be read first as a rules-guy but as a sensitive, pastoral interpreter of Jesus’s teaching.

I had planned to finish my “reframing” of Paul’s sexual ethics with this post, but it looks like I’m going to need a third piece for this series, to be posted in a few weeks. Today’s post looks at Paul’s emphasis on singleness and the ways that emphasis stands in deep continuity with Jesus, relativizing the biological family for the sake of the ecclesial family.

Ocean Undulations Revealing Particles of Sand and Coral, Barbara Aubin, public domain via The Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul has some things to say about marrying and not marrying. His teaching sounds incredibly strange to us, so strange that we try very hard to play it down.

He gives sex advice to married folk (don’t deprive each other; neither spouse has authority over their own body),¹ but then he adds that this advice is a “concession” and not a “command” (vs. 6) and that he wishes everyone were like him (vs. 7) (that is, single and in no need of sex advice).

In verse 8, we get a restatement of the same; “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain unmarried as I am.”

Just in case we didn’t get it, Paul loops back around to the same point; “it is good for you [virgins] to remain as you are” (vs. 26).

And Paul has good reason for this counsel; he wants us to be “free from anxieties” (vs. 32), and married people are inevitably “anxious about the affairs of the world” (vs. 33 and again in vs. 34; the danger is exactly the same for both men and women).

Paul is really big on being unmarried. He does stop and check his teaching here, granting that marrying “is no sin” (vs. 36). It’s fine, if you feel like you’ve got to do it, but not marrying is “better” (vs. 38), and a widow who remains unmarried is “more blessed” (vs. 40) than if she marries again.

I’ve taken the time to lay all this out, in order to emphasize how clear and repetitive Paul is about this. It’s better not to marry.

Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 is interspersed with other topics on sexual ethics (sex advice, advice on marriage to unbelievers, advice about fiancées), but Paul returns to his main theme throughout: it’s better not to get married. And it’s better to abstain from sex.

Since I don’t have time to write thousands of words on the topic, I’ll ask you to trust me when I tell you that the early church took Paul’s advice and believed it. As strange as it may seem to you and me to put single celibacy above marriage, it would have seemed that strange and stranger to Christians in the early centuries of the church (and, really, for much of the first 1500 years of Christian history) to entertain the idea that Christians (like us!) might teach the opposite. Ancient Christians just did not suppose that marriage was automatically the best thing to do. They did not consider marriage the goal of male and female embodiment or the prize every young person would want to receive.

So, most Christians have assumed, with Paul, that single celibacy is better than marriage. Marriage is good, taught Augustine, but singleness is better (ahem, a nice bit of literal reading of 1 Corinthians 7:38-40). And Augustine isn’t being weird and grumpy here. In fact, he was refuting that grump, Jerome, who had gone and said that marriage is straight up bad. Not so, said Augustine, marriage is good. Marriage is good, but—obviously—celibate singleness is better. And when the wild, free thinking Jovinian suggested that marriage and singleness might be two equal goods, Augustine corrected him: marriage = good. Singleness = a greater good.

Hadn’t Jovinian read Paul? Noticed that Jesus was single? Met celibate Christian men and women whose lives were stunning examples of holiness? It all seemed very obvious to Augustine.

Some early Christian women got so excited about Paul’s advice that they were willing to face martyrdom rather than submit to marriage. Before we assume these women were prudes or had problems with embodiment, we might want to consider what a choice for Jesus over a husband might have meant in the ancient context. In the Roman empire, the women had a purpose: produce children for their husbands and the empire. To choose Jesus over marriage, then, was to claim to have a purpose beyond that defined by the state.

Imagine that your whole culture and society tells you constantly that the very reason for your existence is to belong to a man and to make babies. (Imagine, in ancient Rome, you’re a 13 year old girl and the man your family wants you to belong to is 35 and assumes absolute patriarchal authority over you.)

Then, Paul comes along and tells you that the reason for your existence is Jesus.

Women’s bodies are not for their parents or their husbands. Women’s bodies are not for babies. Women’s bodies are not for Rome or Caesar or the homeland or the people. Women’s bodies are not for the culture war or for capitalism. Women’s bodies are not for Instagram.

Women’s bodies are for Jesus. (Men’s bodies too, of course, but that part was and is less startling than the part about women.)

“For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.” Colossians 1:16

Not only was that revolutionary in the ancient world, it might feel pretty revolutionary to a lot of women in our world too (have you watched the Shiny Happy People documentary about the Duggar family and Bill Gothard? A lot of women in those situations could use some freeing words from Paul.)

In the story of Agnes of Rome, whenever a suitor approached her, she replied that she was “already promised to the Lord of the universe.” She chose martyrdom over marriage.

Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Saint Agnes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Agnes is often pictured with a lamb, a pun on her name.

So, Paul’s teaching on the value of celibate singleness has a purpose. Paul wants us to be free from the cares of the world and free for “unhindered devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35).

What’s more, said freedom is a kind of political witness. It says that Rome is not the kingdom, and it calls for undivided loyalty to King Jesus.

It’s easy to instrumentalize this teaching on singleness, easy to talk about it as though the whole point were that single people have more hours for evangelism and service than married folks do. As a married women, I’m tempted to this kind of instrumentaliziation and even romanticizing of singleness. But the point of Pauline singlness isn’t work hours. The point of that singleness is Jesus.

Freedom for Jesus. Freedom in Jesus. Wholeness (undividedness) in Jesus.

And Paul isn’t pulling this teaching out of nowhere. It stands in fundamental continuity with the teaching of Jesus, which demotes the importance of the biological family in favor of the ecclesial family.

“Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.’

^‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ he asked.

Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’” Mark 3:31-35

“‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.’” Matthew 10:34-36.

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26

Jesus assumes that marriage, family, sex, and babies are good gifts from God, but he takes that assumption and broadens it. Family is no longer primarily about biological reproduction. It’s about the family of God.

Pregnancy is good, but it is relativized in favor of the goods of evangelism and growing in the fruit of the Spirit.

Human marriage is good, but it is relativized in light of the good of union with Christ, the Bridegroom.

Sons and daughters are good, but they are relativized by the fact that we are all invited to enter into Jesus’s sonship and become, with him, heirs of the Father in the Spirit.

Paul isn’t making something out of nothing when he counsels the great good of singleness. Paul is building on the single Jesus’s invitation to join a family that is more than birth and to enter into a politics that is more than earthly.

Part III of this series will take up Paul’s eschatology and his teaching on the indwelling of the Spirit. I’ll post that piece in a few weeks. Next week, look for two pieces on the Spirit and spirituality.

May you know the undivided freedom of belonging to Jesus.

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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One of the most radically mutual claims in the New Testament. We might even call it “egalitarian.”