Grace: Your body's or Someone Else's?

Tyler asked me to read The Body's Grace by Rowan Williams - a defense of homosexuality by the future Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church in England.

The Good

My mom (and everyone else's I think) said "if you cannot say something nice, do not say anything at all"; and there are some things here that are exquisite:

The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.

This nearly erotic picture of God's love for us gives us deep understanding of the significance, acceptance, and security we have in Christ. He continues:

The life of the Christian community has as its rationale . . . the task of teaching us this: so ordering our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy

Indeed, all Heaven celebrates when any one of us is saved. The core of all evangelism is to have non-believers see that God loves them; desires them to share in that loving relationship with Him; and that nothing they have done in their life alters that.

Williams shows the true heart of a loving sexual relationship: that each partner's sexual pleasure comes in pleasing the other and not themselves. He comes close to calling heterosexual sex in a legal marriage perversion if "in that they leave one agent in effective control of the situation - one agent, that is, who doesn't have to wait upon the desire of the other." and later mentions 1 Corinthians 7

4 The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Of course, I think in this case he is better served mentioning any of the "one flesh" quotes; but oh well. Also, he mentions Ephesians 5:

28 So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; 29 for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church,

All in all, him and I agree that the sexual relationship God wants is one where the partners unite mind, body and soul; treat each other unselfishly sexually; and put their partner's needs on all of these levels over their own. This is the relationship that serves God and glorifies Him; it is what marriage in His name should be; and being heterosexual and married does not imply you have this. Finally, he "tantalizes" with this:

I suspect that a fuller exploration of the sexual metaphors of the Bible will have more to teach us about a theology and ethics of sexual desire than will the flat citation of isolated texts

The Bad

And delivers nothing:

"and I hope other theologians will find this worth following up more fully than I can do here."

This is what I expected him to do. He did have time to spend a third of his space on examples from the Raj Quartet by Paul Scott; and quotes from Thomas Nagel and Susan Griffin.

Now for homosexuality: Archbishop Williams argues that homosexual relationships are able to embody that complete unselfishness and abandonment of self to the other, and therefore they too will reflect and glorify God. Garry J. Williams, in The Theology of Rowan Williams:

"The method which Williams employs in his theological argument entails a significant non sequitur. He finds that God desires his people, and he identifies sexual desire with that desire in God. There may be some basis for this analogy, given that God is so often in Scripture depicted as the husband of his bride. It is, however, hermeneutically dubious to use the relation betweenGod and his people to justify specific sexual activity" [and] "There are thus two leaps here. One is from the desire or love of God for his people to human sexual desire, and the other is from heterosexual biblical examples to homosexual acts. Like the first, this second leap is consistently and conspicuously absent in the Bible . . . Scripture does not make the step which Williams makes, in that it customarily marks a clear distinction between heterosexual and homosexual relations and compares aspects of God's relation to his people with the former and not the latter."

Archbishop Williams does approach scripture in defending homosexuality in one way: he attacks procreation as the major factor in God's view of authentic sexual relations. Here I think he is right: I do not believe reproduction is the central point in God's plan for our "one flesh" relationships; although it is certainly a point. However, he brushes by (and brushes off) what is to me the real points:

the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts [see my piece on this], or on a problematic and non-scriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures

The bold part is what he just blows by: complementarity is very much a part of every scripture on this subject. He fails to try to make a case for the opposite - so of course none is made. Garry Williams says this is a natural outflowing from his general theological mistake in dismissing revelation in favor of experience.

and The Ugly

This should have been the first thing I talked about since it explains the title of the work - The Body's Grace - but once the parallelism with Clint Eastwood hit me . . . He does not mean grace from the Body of Christ; but grace our own body shows us when we work out our "fear and trembling" over time in giving ourselves up to the mutuality of an equal relationship with another.

In scripture which is simply packed with references to "the flesh" (our bodily desires) this position that we seek the body's grace is simply wrong. We seek God's grace to work through these relationships; His strength to overcome the "fear and trembling" as we work out a true bond of mind, soul, and body. I would argue that in many cases giving in to the grace of our body separates us from the grace of God.

Archbishop Williams seems to imply that homosexuals actually have an easier time finding the body's grace once they have made those first decisions to "identify certain patterns as sterile, undeveloped or even corrupt" and "what we want our bodily life to say, how our bodies are to be brought in to the whole project of 'making human sense' for ourselves and each other." He says:

"a conventional (heterosexual) morality simply absolves us from the difficulties we might meet in doing so. The question of human meaning is not raised, we are not helped to see what part sexuality plays in our learning to be human with one another, to enter the body's grace, because all we need to know is that sexual activity is licensed in one context and in no other." [and] ". . . where [do] the massive cultural and religious anxiety about same-sex relationships that is so prevalent at the moment comes from . . . I wonder whether it is to do with the fact that same-sex relations oblige us to think directly about bodiliness and sexuality in a way that socially and religiously sanctioned heterosexual unions don't."

Not only am I wrong for following scripture on the issue of homosexuality, I am stunting my physical and emotional growth in my relationship with my wife by doing so. I suppose I need a version of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" to get in touch with my bodily life and to recieve its grace.