Category: Books

We saw earlier that Countryman argues that we can’t, because of the vast gulf that separates our social world from those of the Bible, simply apply “the Biblical ethic” to contemporary concerns. But does that mean that the Bible has nothing to say to us regarding sexual ethics? By no means!

First, as already mentioned, Countryman thinks that one of the chief functions of the Bible is to “relativize” our own social world by bringing us into contact with the very different ones of the biblical world. Second, and more importantly, the Bible records the transformation of the social world of first-century Christians as they encountered the gospel of God’s grace.

If Scripture is important partly because it is alien to and therefore relativizes our own historical-cultural situation, it is even more important in that it can show, by reference to the way the grace of God broke into the self-sufficiency of another culture, how it breaks into our own as well. The New Testament writers did not try to construct a new sexual ethic from the ground up. They took over the existing cultural patterns and refocused them, pushing some elements from the center to the periphery, altering the balance of powers allotted to various members of society and, most important, relativizing the familiar life of this world by subordinating it to the reign of God. (p. 219)

To provide a framework for doing the same in our own historical-cultural situation, Countryman offers six “generative principles” derived from the NT which, in turn, can offer guidance for navigating current ethical dilemmas in the realm of sex:

1. “Membership in the Christian community is in no way limited by purity codes.” This means that nothing is “unclean” in itself, but only as it violates one of the other substantive principles. “To be specific, the gospel allows no rule against the following, in and of themselves: masturbation, nonvaginal heterosexual intercourse, bestiality[!*], polygamy, homosexual acts, or erotic art and literature” (p. 223). This doesn’t mean that there aren’t circumstances under which any of these might be wrong, but that wrongness doesn’t have to do with the “unclean” nature of any of these acts.

2. “Christians must respect the sexual property of others and practice detachment from their own.” Countryman makes the interesting observation that “the New Testament interests itself in property not so much in order to defend me against my neighbor as to defend my neighbor against me” (p. 221). In other words, property–including the “property” each person has in his or her self–refers to a kind of zone of inviolability around each person. The corresponding point is that Christians ought to be ready to give up their own prerogatives in service to the neighbor’s well-being.

3. “Where, in late antiquity, sexual property belonged to the family through the agency of the male householder, in our own era it belongs to the individual.” This principle is derived from the changed cultural situation rather than from the NT itself, and necessarily qualifies the previous principle. In our world “the individual is the primary arbiter of his or her sexual acts” (p. 222). Among other things, this implies that the goods one seeks in entering into a lasting sexual relationship no longer have to do primarily with political alliances between families, ensuring legitimate heirs, etc. Rather they are more likely to be intangible goods like “friendship, encouragement, counsel, solace, and a new sense of family to supplement and eventually replace the natal family” (p. 233)–in addition, of course, to the satisfaction of sexual desire.

4. “The gospel can discern no inequality between men and women as they stand before God’s grace.” While the NT authors made certain accommodations to the social realities of their day, the trajectory of Christian ethics is toward one of egalitarianism between men and women. This qualifies, for example, any assessment of polygamy which, if not proscribed because of “impurity,” does not have the greatest track record when it comes to securing the dignity and well-being of women. In addition to “the revision of household rules and the alteration of household roles,” Christian egalitarianism calls for nothing less than “new understandings of manliness and womanliness” (p. 239). Countryman suggests that heterosexual couples could have much to learn from homosexual ones, who lack socially-prescribed roles and division of labor.

5. “Marriage creates a union of flesh, normally indissoluble except by death.” In the ancient world, ensuring the virginity and fidelity of the bride was essentially to shoring up the familial property regime. But how does this principle apply to marriages based on the intangible “internal” goods mentioned above? Countryman flatly denies that we should expect young people getting married always, or even typically, to be virgins since “the goods sought in connection with marriage in an individual society are goods which can best be offered only by a mature person and such a person will more often than not have acquired some sexual experience” (p. 241). He goes on to suggest that the church might defer blessing marriages until a mature relationship has had time to develop and does not rule out, in principle, pre-marital sexual activity.

6. “The Christian’s sexual life and property are always subordinate to the reign of God.” This is the most fundamental principle. Christians “belong” to Christ, and seeking first his kingdom and righteousness will not uncommonly require “sacrifice of lesser to greater good” (p. 222). While sex is “an integral part of the human person, particularly as joining us to one another, and therefore has a right to be included in the spiritual transformation which follows upon our hearing of the gospel,” (p. 245) it is not central, any more than other finite goods. To the extent we make it central to our lives, we are fashioning an idol.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of Countryman’s specific applications of these principles (though his discussions of, among other things, birth control, abortion, and prostitution are well worth attending to). But I do think that his general position is on more or less the right track. It’s unrealistic to expect to have timeless commandments that apply equally well to the tight-knit pastoral society of ancient Israel, the urbanized Mediterranean world of the first century, and our contemporary globalized, individualist world. More to the point, many of the traditional rules only made sense in the context of a purity system or a familial-property ethic that we wouldn’t want to resurrect even if we could! This isn’t relativism, but an attempt to uphold the gospel as that in light of which we can criticize and question those partial and relative truths that often masquerade as absolutes.
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*Regarding bestiality, Countryman says “where it is the casual recourse of the young or of people isolated over long periods of time from other humans, [it] should occasion little concern. It is probably too isolated a phenomenon to justify strong feelings” (p. 224). That may be true, but he neglects to mention that such acts may also wrong the animals involved!

One of the main reasons we can’t simply apply the “Biblical” sexual ethic (or ethics!) to our contemporary world, argues Countryman in Dirt, Greed & Sex (see the previous post), is that we have gone from a family-centered society to an individual-centered one. The property ethic that governed sexual relations in the ancient world existed to uphold the importance of the patriarchal family; given that this state of affairs no longer exists (at least in much of the world), we can’t assume the applicability of that ethic to our world.

A refreshing thing about Countryman is that he’s willing to look at both the pros and cons of modern Western individualism, instead of embracing it or rejecting it wholesale. Here’s a representative passage:

The individualization of modern American society is a social fact, an aspect of the environment in which we make ethical decisions, not an ethical principle itself. As such, it is neither good nor bad. It represents some losses as against earlier, family-structured eras and also some gains. If the human being now lacks the kind of inevitable links with a social continuum that the earlier society afforded, that loss must be balanced against the fact that individualization has gone hand in hand with–and is probably the condition for–what progress this century has made toward genuine equality of races, nationalities, and the sexes. The ability of modern people to choose for themselves with regard to education, work, living place, life-partner, religion, or politics became conceivable only as the family ceased to be the basic unit of society and was replaced by the individual. (p. 231)

And yet, we need to distinguish between relatively benign and more objectionable forms of ethical individualism:

Individuality can become an ethical principle in two ways. Philosophically speaking, it may become so by a recognition that my individuality is intelligible only as an expression of the principle which renders every other human being an individual, too. This principle was already being expressed in late antiquity in the Golden Rule; respect for my individuality implies respect for that of others. As such, it enters into Christian ethics, but it is by no means the crowning element in them. It could not, for example, have generated the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross or the witness of the martyrs, which require the further principles of love, faith, and hope for their understanding. On the other hand, individuality can also become an ethical principle in the form of individualism–an idolatry of the self, which treats the self as its own source and end. Such individualism has been a pervasive ethical influence in the modern West, enshrined in certain forms of capitalist ideology as the image of the “self-made” person–that is, the person who has chosen to forget the role others played in his fashioning and rise and who regards with interest only those people and things that contribute to his own aggrandizement. This individualism, like any other idolatry is utterly inconsistent with the gospel. (p. 231)

It’s common to hear denunciations of “individualism” from theological quarters, but some critics aren’t as careful as Countryman in making these distinctions. The individualism that has been the precondition of much social progress is different than the idolatry of the self that Countryman (rightly, I should think) says is incompatible with the gospel. This new individualistic context will play a significant role in assessing the sexual property ethic and its relevance for our time.

Having been stuck at home for the better part of a week, I’ve had ample time to catch up on my reading. One book I finally got around to was L. William Countryman’s Dirt, Greed & Sex, a study of the sexual ethics of the New Testament.

Countryman–a professor of New Testament and an Episcopalian–focuses on the ways in which the NT modified or discarded the existing rules surrounding sexual conduct that it inherited from Judaism and the broader Greco-Roman culture. The two organizing concepts he uses are related to the Torah’s purity code (“dirt”) and the property ethic rooted in the patriarchal family of the ancient world (“greed”).

In his telling, the NT is consistent, indeed almost unanimous, in rejecting sexual norms based on physical purity/impurity. As enunciated in the Torah, purity has to do with maintaining the “wholeness” of individuals and boundaries between kinds of things. The resulting ethic is based on avoiding or removing ritual impurity, whether intentionally incurred or not. (This covers everything from contract with menstruating women to homosexual relations.) By contrast, he says, when “purity” is used in the NT, it refers to purity of heart, or the intention underlying our actions.

Obviously, the question of the law and its ongoing role in the Christian community was an important topic for the NT writers. Countryman shows, however, that the NT takes a fairly consistent line that allowed Jewish Christians to continue observing the purity requirements of the law, while definitively rejecting that observation as a requirement for Gentiles to become full-fledged Christians. Purity is not a condition for receiving God’s grace. And purity and ethics are two different kinds of discourse. (Relevant here is his particularly fascinating exegesis of the much-discussed Romans 1 as it relates to homosexuality.) “With the possible exception of Jude and Revelation, all the documents that dealt with physical purity at all agreed in rejecting it as an authoritative ethic for Christians as such” (p. 123).

The sexual ethic of the NT, to the extent we can discern one, is a modified form of the property ethic common both to ancient Israelite culture and the broader ancient world. This family-centered culture rested squarely on the patriarchal family unit in which women, children, and slaves were essentially the property of the male head of the household. For example, adultery was condemned on the grounds that the man who committed it was stealing property from another man (because depriving him of the possibility of legitimate heirs), not because it represented the violation of a relationship of trust between the adulterer and his wife.

The NT introduces some major changes to this ethic. First, Jesus’ ministry disrupts the centrality of the patriarchal family. By calling disciples to “leave everything” and follow him, Jesus rejects the priority of the family to all other loyalties. And by telling his disciples they must become “like children,” he introduces an egalitarianism into the Christian community that contrasts starkly with the hierarchy of the “traditional family.” Second, both Jesus and Paul affirm–at least in principle–the equality of men and women. One critical example is Jesus’ teaching that both men and women can be guilty of adultery, and the corresponding implication that both partners have sexual “property rights” in the other. This represents a major elevation of women’s status compared to the traditional patriarchal family.

Both Jesus and Paul, Countryman insists, see sexuality as good, but not something to be put at the center of one’s life. Loyalty to God’s reign is the overarching value of the Christian life, and all other goods find their proper place only in relation to this. This accounts for the NT’s–at times radical–disregard for traditional family structures.

Countryman recognizes that there are some outliers in the NT, such as the Pastoral Epistles, which seem to be trying to put a more socially respectable face on Christianity, and Revelation, which seems perhaps to uphold virginity as the ideal for all Christians. But the mainstream tendency of New Testament Christianity is neither strictly ascetical nor hedonistic (two dissenting tendencies Paul had to fight in his Corinthian community), but subordinates sexual fulfillment to the calling each one of us receives from God.

Paul in particular is fairly pragmatic: he may prefer that people remain celibate, but recognizes that celibacy is a gift not given to everyone. Sexual desire is a sufficient reason for getting married, though Paul is careful to note that, in light of God’s inbreaking reign, the distinctions between married, single, betrothed, etc. aren’t all that important.

One of the key points Countryman wants to make is that there is no “Biblical” sexual ethic that we can simply adopt wholesale and apply to our current situation. Both the purity ethic and the property ethic presuppose social structures that are almost completely foreign to us. This doesn’t mean, however, that the NT has no value for our ethics. For one thing, the very “alien-ness” of the biblical world can provide a critical perspective on our own: the way things are isn’t the way they have to be.

Secondly, Countryman thinks we can extract some “generative principles” that provide guidance for contemporary Christian ethics. But since this has already gone on long enough, I’ll save that discussion for a future post.