ATLANTA—Varied views on the human body in the Bible and church tradition shape modern Christians’ attitudes about sexuality, ethicist Melissa Browning told a [Baptist] Conference on Sexuality and Covenant.
Christians need to formulate “an embodied theology … that is rooted in and takes seriously our relationship to our bodies,” Browning told participants at the April 19-21 event at First Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Mercer University’s Center for Theology and Public Life sponsored the conference. That kind of theology rooted in experience challenges Christians to re-examine their views on same-sex relations, she asserted.
Melissa Browning
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"While there are resources within the Scripture for mutuality and equality, there are also texts that devalue women's bodies or maintain strict gender hierarchies that shape opposite-sex relationships today. For those of us seeking to dismantle their hierarchies, same-sex relationships can point toward justice, modeling a form of relationality that is not hierarchal and is less caught up in the constraints of gender," she said.
Ancient beliefs about the body and sexuality—such as early physicians who saw sex as dangerous because they believed it caused the blood to boil and Stoic philosophers who sought a life free from passions—influenced early Christian views, said Brown.
Those beliefs—reflected in the writing of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament—diverged considerably from the Hebrew Scriptures and its celebration of sex as seen in Song of Songs “by placing sexuality primarily in the realm of rules that regulate the passions,” said Browning, adjunct instructor in ethics at Lexington Theological Seminary, McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University and Kennesaw State University.
“In the Pauline letters, we see a much different view of sex,” Browning asserted. “The body is not to be trusted. Salvation happens not in the body, but in the mind. Marriage is a way of quenching desire. … Sex within marriage was good because it kept desire at bay. … Nowhere in Paul’s writings is there a place where sexual desire is seen as good.”
Paul’s writings deeply influenced Augustine and, consequently, much Catholic theology, she observed.
Jesus provided a different view of the body than Paul by emphasizing an embodied ministry that encompassed every aspect of human experience, Browning said.
“Jesus took on human form—the form of a body—to know our sufferings, to meet our spiritual and bodily needs. For Jesus, bodies and spirits were never separate,” she said, pointing to the times Jesus fed hungry people, healed the sick and violated taboos by touching people considered untouchable.
“For Jesus, the stuff of the body, the stuff of creation, was good. It was the stuff of life,” she said.
Jesus remained mostly silent on issues that capture much of the attention in modern ethical debates, such as same-sex relations and views about family, she said.
“Jesus never married and called his family those who followed him, not those related to him by blood,” she noted.
Modern Christians, on the other hand, seem “a bit infatuated with sexual sins” and make attitudes toward sexuality “a litmus test for faith,” Browning said.
“Sex does not define us entirely. It is not all-important. It is only part of who we are as moral people, as people of God,” she insisted.
“I believe that part of the reason that we allow sex to define us—and each other—comes from our mistrust of our bodies. With the Apostle Paul, we see the body as the space of desire that must be disciplined. We do not love or trust our bodies—at least, not enough.
“We too often neglect the words from creation that call the body good. We too often forget the example of Jesus who touched and healed bodies, of Jesus who was embodied—God embodied in human form.”
Embodied theology demands that Christian overcome a dualistic view of mind and body and ask the right questions about sexual ethics, Browning said.
“Marriages, like any other relationships, can be just or unjust,” she said. Browning noted her research on HIV-positive women in Tanzania, where 80 percent of the women contracted HIV from an unfaithful spouse.
“What does it mean to listen to the stories of HIV-positive women and do theology from the body? What does it mean to allow the experiences of their bodies to inform the way we think about sexual ethics about covenant, about which relationships are just and which relationships are unjust?” she asked.
“The bodily experiences of women abused and raped within their marriages reminds us that a marriage document alone carries little moral weight.”
Browning called on Christians to “do theology from the body,” listening to lived experiences—even those that make them uncomfortable.
“When we do theology from the body, we not only remember our physical bodies, but the bodies of those around us, others in our community, the body of Christ. … How might our gay and lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer sisters and brothers be teaching us to finally accept sex as grace and gift?”
Fanning urged Christians to ask hard questions about the link between traditional understandings of marriage and patriarchal institutions.
“When we listen to the body, when we love the body, when we do theology from the body, we learn that lived experience matters,” she said.
Ken Camp ([email protected]) is managing editor of the Baptist Standard.