I was inspired to launch into this topic by three other posts. First, by my friend David Fitch's post on Questioning The Great Emergence--What Emergents Don't Understand About Us Anabaptists. Then Dave wrote another post, What Has Become of the Emerging Church? The Problem of a Never Ending Conversation. The third post was Wendy VanderWal Gritter's response to Dave's "disputable matters":Another Take on Disputable Matters.
I deeply resonated with Wendy's response. Wendy has a specific calling as building a bridge between the LGBT community and "straight" Christian communities. I think there is a place for that and I respect Wendy's call. I think Wendy raises some good questions when it comes to hermeneutics, faith, and sexuality. I am all for a deeper conversation on hermeneutics, faith and sexuality. For me, obviously, it comes as no surprise to regular readers of Faith Dance, there is a separate and distinct place when it comes to faith and sexuality, for a deeper conversation on male-female love inside marriage and outside that relationship: male-female love in friendship. Sexual ethics covers a wide range of issues in the faith and sexuality conversation. The gay conversation and the male-female love conversation are two separate issues. As Victor Luftig and others have pointed out, simple but deep cross-gender friendships challenge the status quo on gender issues but from a different angle than the LGBT conversation.
Indeed, as Wendy so eloquently writes, "One has to wonder if there is space within a local community to wrestle with diverse perspective when there seems to be such an urgency towards concrete resolution. Given the emphasis on Lordship, one might ask who’s definition of Lordship."
Is there a place for deep conversation within community? Is there is a place for deep listening within a community on "disputable matters?" Dave writes in one post: "Who gets the authority to say “this issue should be left open versus a belief/and or practice that must be dealt with for the sake of God’s justice/righteousness in the community and world? For the Anabaptist, this is the job of the community as the Holy Spirit works from the ground up." In the second post I mention above, he writes, "Emerging church, I am afraid, sucks us in to a land of never ending conversation....I think that “never ending conversation” is a tendency of the emerging church (especially in the States) because emerging church is good at deconstructing and providing some general challenges to live a different gospel (love driven)....But it provides little for on the ground progress on the difficult issues of the day."
I want to address this but I want to hit the pause button for a moment and talk about hermeneutics and cross-gender friendship or male-female love beyond marriage. The big movement these days after modernity is to be aware of hermeneutics or be aware of our individual interpretations or communal interpretations of the Scripture. No one or no community comes to Scripture in a vacuum. For those who only know me as an author of a book on cross-gender friendship, I dabbled (as an amateur not a theologian) with hermeneutics, reading Kevin Vanhoozer, Nancey Murphy, James Smith, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Bruce Ellis Benson, James Olthuis, Stanley Grenz, John Franke, and others. As a distinct mention, I was also blown away and humbled when I read feminists on hermeneutics. I don't think I could have ever written the book I wrote without my prior dabbling in hermeneutics.
Understanding where we are today in contemporary Christianity and hermeneutics is important for what I am about to say: the issue of faith and sexuality in Christian spirituality and sexuality (in the immediate context for our purposes, male-female love) is complex and diverse.
There is no one single view of faith and sexuality when it comes to male-female love within marriage or outside of marriage in Christian tradition and contemporary Christianity. Even for those who hold to a "traditional" view of marriage regarding one man and one woman, the issue of the meaning of marriage is exceedingly diverse, and complex after you get past one man and one woman. Heterosexism may be a traditional view of marriage within Christianity but hetereosexism has multiple meanings within it and has enormous baggage with it even if one embraces marriage to mean one man and one woman. Not all heterosexual marriages look alike from century to century, from culture to culture, and even now, within the Western world, there is no consensus about what heterosexual marriage means and looks like within the Christian community. This should humble us all or anyone seeking a quick resolution on faith, sexuality, and marriage.
In other words, there is not a single blueprint or one model for male-female love-communion within marriage in Christianity. Christians have not had one, unchanging, absolute model on what marriage means for a heterosexual couple. Indeed, even in the last century, heterosexual marriage has changed dramatically. Christian marriages in the 1920s were different from the 1890s. And marriages from the 1930s looked different than the marriages in the 20s. Marriages in the 50s looked different from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. Marriages in the 70s looked vastly different from the 50s. What marriage looks like for a Christian couple today reading the same Bible looks very different than what it looked like in 1950s. Even many conservatives who hold to "traditional" views of marriage (where the husband is the head) today are different in the way conservatives would have acted in the 50s. There are numerous studies to show this.
So, when I approach the issue of male-female love within marriage and male-female love in friendship (friendships which span the entire range of non-romantic love from close office relationships to deep, intimate non-romantic. "transmarital" relationships) I'm not approaching it as some kind of flavor-of-the-month kinda deal of simplistic preferences. I know just enough about Christian history and about hermeneutics that I am not going to disappear into the woodwork quietly as it were, although I am sure there are some who would like me to.
I'm not approaching it with a relativism of "anything goes" individualistic anarchy. But I am also aware of the simplistic mode of solving issues whether it comes at it from a proof-text biblical foundationalism ("the Bible says" and insert one, two, or three Bible verses) or from a communal foundationalism where community trumps love, trumps individual voices, trumps individual stories for the sake of "community" and quick closure on "conversation."
In some communities, "the Bible says" with 1 or 2 proof texts ends all conversation. In some other communities, where "community" trumps individuals (be they "experts" or just those with chastened but grounded, mature "individual" voices) the conversation can end quite rapidly with a knee-jerk resolution involving complex issues that can't possibly be honored in one, two, or three group (i.e. "community") meetings.
I've seen that happen. Conversation killers because of quick authoritarian responses.
Inserting "community" instead of "the Bible says" does not necessarily invite deep hospitality, deep listening, an ongoing commitment to bigger purposes and Christ beyond the immediate issue at hand, and a beautiful, important, and healthy space for individual voices to express themselves. Deep relational virtures don't happen overnight just because we've inserted "community" in the place where "the Bible says."
As Dale Martin observes, all actual Christian communities are just as prone to sin and self-deception as any individual. Or as Kevin Vanhoozer says, God forbid that we settle for a 1970s North American Christian interpretation of what community looks like for all communities.
Both communal and biblical foundationalism can be premature conversation-killers. They can also drive people away from the Bible and community. Is it possible that Anabaptists in their communal decisions can be just as quick to kill conversations as any Bible-thumping, hierarchcial foundationalist?
To make things even more complex, a communal decison may avoid a heirarchcial model or it may not--especially if it has a leader with great power and respected voice in the community.
Who gets to say what is a "never-ending conversation?" The community? Or the leader with the most power and clout (invisible or visible) within an Anabaptist community? And what does that process look like? And on what issues? And with what criteria deciding those issues?
What if a substantial part of the "conversation" is learning how to create and nurture space, nurture voices, nurture stories of difference within the community? What if part of the purpose of conversation is to create enduring, patient relationships within the community around purposes greater than the immediate issue at hand? What if part of the purpose of conversation is to create enduring relationships beyond the immediate community as well? It's in conversation we learn forebearance, patience, gentleness, kindness, joy, forgiveness, delight, and deep love. We don't arrive at deep relational virtues without deep listening and deep conversations.
Who gets to define the criteria for which conversations to end and on what time table for "disputable matters"? For me, one of the refreshing things about the emerging movement has been a fresh look into hermeneutics, love, patience, tolerance, (tolerance is minimally good but it should be a place to start not a place to end) and conversation on many subjects that were once easily solved by the dogmatic, proof-texting of "the Bible says." It doesn't provide substantial diversified witness if we just replace "the Bible says" with "the community says."
Communities have to nurture a place for conversations where the individual's voice matters. This is important for women as well as for men. Conversations matter because individual voices matter just as much as communities matter. Bypassing individual voices for taking a "communal shortcut" to end conversations for the sake of an urgent drive to resolution may actually undermine mission instead of bolstering mission. We live in an exceedingly diverse complex relational world and short conversations may not be deep enough to be an incarnational presence for mission.
Oh yes, there is the problem of individual autonomy. But there is also the problem of communal conformity, peer pressure, groupthink, etc. There can be an ecclesial arrogance and pride that is just as unhealthy and repugnant as individualistic autonomous, pride. There has to be a place and space for communities to nurture a voice, a self, or a sense of conscience that does not just defer to a communal authority just because it says so. Otherwise, we have no place for a voice to discern wisdom between what is good and healthy community and what is an oppressive community. And we leave no place for what are deep conversations within a community.
This is where I am coming from and I invite others into the conversation.
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