Sex and Identity

An interesting little conversation took place a while ago. I am certainly late to posting on this, in fact it has been sitting around as a draft for a while. I am certainly in no place to make a judgment, rather I aim to recount all of it and gather facts. Certainly this issue has been perplexing the Church for several years now, specifically the Lutheran and Anglican denominations. There are certainly issues worth highlighting.

“If Christ [i.e. not Freud] is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness” – since Jesus himself did not participate in any of these experiences.

The quote within the quote there is the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. And it is an incontrovertible fact. Any Christocentric approach of anthropology must take this line. One can always cease to be Christocentric anthropologically, and I imagine that some have, but one is left to argue why that understanding should be preferred over the authentic and perfect humanity of Christ. I think Barth is right to underscore that our sexuality is a part of our identity, you would have an uphill battle in our times to prove otherwise. Perhaps he was mistaken to imagine that is it the pinnacle or underlying issue of our humanity.

Foucault’s argument shows that we are obsessed not with sex itself (as a physical act), but with “the truth of sex” – with the idea that sex is a revelation of truth.

For myself I find this to be true. The temptation of the act lies not so much in the act itself, but what beyond the act is signified. If sex, and sexuality, is just a red herring for us where might we look?

For one thing, I think Christians ought to take much more seriously the category of friendship, while thinking a good deal more critically about the unbridled theologisation of marriage and the so-called “family unit”

I find the overall statement of the Gospel, as evidenced in the New Testament to be specifically a new family. As I’ve become more keen, thanks to some training, to pick out the civil religion instituted as a part of the United States, I wonder just how much this idea of the family unit is tainted. Surely the thrust of the Gospel message is an entirely new community. More than a single family living detached from every other single family. This intense level of friendship is hard to sustain – that I am sure, on very few occasions I’ve tried.

Marriage, he contends, offers an expression of love and sexuality not realisable in any other human relationship, but it is no more human than any other human task or relationship.

Imagine holding marriage and friendship on the same level of humanness? I’ve never conceived of them that way. I ought to and see what comes of it. Again, if we’re to have a Christocentric approach, what is the epitome of humanity? Self-giving, self-sacrificial love with a goal of God’s will being done in the world. What does that look like in a friendship, in a marriage, in a community of faith? That ought to be what we look towards when we ask ourselves these kinds of questions, is it not?

It may, through the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit be commandeered and become in many and sundry ways a parable of the kingdom, just as many of the trivial aspects of human life are open to God’s interruption and transfiguration. But, insofar as the meaning of authentic human existence, sexuality tells us nothing. Not if we really believe that Jesus defines for us what it means to be be human. And, further to this point, only when we allow sex to be truly and wonderfully insignificant, to be trivial, will it be able to be received as a gift rather than gulpingly grasped in an idolatrous fit of fetishizing.