Phillip Johnston on rethinking Christian singleness
Unmarried Christians are often forced to live within a tension created by two common and competing assumptions.
The first is the secular assumption that it is necessary to be sexually active in order to be a properly functioning adult person. Magazines, advice columns, and TV programmes insist that sexual expression is necessary for individual flourishing and have constructed a social atmosphere where it is now seems strange to think otherwise.
The second and competing assumption is often found in Christian circles and it is that marriage is a normative part of the Christian journey, an inevitable aspect of sanctification. Singleness is defined primarily as the absence of marriage. It is the problem which marriage is designed to fix.
A positive state
It is all too easy for the single Christian to feel alone when we spend six days of the week in a society that tells us to grasp at sexual fulfillment and the other day in churches which encourage sexual purity, while simultaneously (if tacitly) viewing singleness as a lesser state.
In accord with the clear teaching of the New Testament (Matthew 19, 1 Corinthians 7, etc.), our churches must uphold singleness as a positive state. My contention is that we must do so, not by adopting a lower view of marriage, but by viewing marriage and single-ness as two vocations with the same goal. In short, both marriage and singleness must be seen as schools to help us direct our desire in ways that embody the fidelity we see in God.
Embodying God’s fidelity
Before anything ever was, God existed in the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Out of the fullness of that love, God made the world and placed human beings in it. Why? Because in God there is desire, a deep longing for relationship with what he has made. God made us for relationship – indeed, for union – with him.
God is a desiring God and, made in his image, we are desiring creatures. But unlike God’s own desire, our desire signifies a lack in us. We are missing something. This is because all of the desires we have, however great or small, find their root origin in God our creator and are meant to find their ultimate satisfaction in relationship to him.
Deep in our nature as fallen human beings is an impulse to satisfy our desires with the plenitude of the world divorced from this relationship with God the creator. Though our deepest desires are for God, we seek their satisfaction elsewhere. When faced with the choice of being lovers of pleasure or lovers of God, we often choose the former. We are unfaithful to the God who made us for himself.
But God is still a desiring God – and his desire leads him to faithfulness and fidelity to his creation. Throughout Scripture, God’s fidelity is signified by a covenant in which he binds himself in faithful love to his people. It is out of God’s deep covenantal love that he sent Jesus Christ into the world to restore humanity’s relationship to him and to transform those who believe into the very image of Jesus – the faithful love of God clothed in human flesh.
The Christian church is comprised of people who have embraced Jesus Christ by faith, people who yearn for the kingdom of God and seek to embody its values in the present, values found at the very heart of God. In God we find desire that leads him to fidelity to his people and to his creation. Because we bear God’s image, we were made to embody that same kind of fidelity.
Both Christian marriage and Christian singleness school us in this kind of fidelity. Whereas the married person is called primarily to embody God’s fidelity in relationship to their spouse and family, the single person is called to embody God’s fidelity in relationship to the Christian community at large. Christian singleness is not simply a negative vocation oriented toward the avoidance of sexual sin. It is a positive vocation oriented toward the health and cultivation of Christian community.
The burning question
But what about sex? Christian singleness assumes celibacy – and when we think about celibacy and marriage in the modern world, it is tempting to see them as polar opposites. Is this a realistic assumption?
In a provocative essay on celibacy1, Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley explains that all faithful marriages inevitably involve periods of sexual self-denial by one person for the sake of the other due to delicate pregnancy, physical separation, or the complexity of aging. Faithfulness in marriage often demands that the stream of desire be directed toward something other than sexual gratification.
This redirection of desire, so essential to healthy marriages, is also found in the life of the faithful celibate person who redirects the energy of his or her desire into the service and flourishing of others.
This is no easy thing. But in moments where the redirection of desire is required, both the married person and the celibate person realise that the goal of their desire is something far greater than their own temporary satisfaction. The goal is the transformation of desire into something other-focussed rather than self-focussed – into something that embodies God’s own fidelity.
God’s desire is to form in all Christians a clear reflection of the same fidelity he extends toward them in Christ. The vital thing for both married and single Christians to remember is that we are all in this trans-formative process together.
Looking ahead
This long haul of faithfulness is undertaken in anticipation of the consummated kingdom of God, where no individual will be ‘single’ and yet all marriage bonds as we now know them will be dissolved (Matthew 22.30). In that day, there will be only one marriage: the marriage of Jesus to his Bride, the Church – the marriage for which all of broken humanity has yearned and to which all earthly marriages pointed in shadow form. There all of our desire will reach its truest destination and we will drink in joy from its infinite source—God himself. ‘For your Maker is your husband—the LORD Almighty is his name’ (Isaiah 54.5).
Phillip Johnston is a staff worker at L’Abri Fellowship in Hampshire, a Christian residential study centre open to guests seeking a welcoming place to ask life’s many questions. He holds an MDiv from Covenant Theological Seminary in the United States.
FOOTNOTE
1 Sarah Coakley, ‘Ecclesiastical Sex Scandals: The Lack of a Contemporary Theology of Desire’ in The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2015), pp.29-53. I take issue with a variety of Coakley’s conclusions about gender and sexuality, but this insight is a timely and important one for all Christians.
