Gender, sexuality and the shape of love

Colin is the pastor of Carrickmacross Baptist Church in the Republic of Ireland and a tutor for Crosslands Training. Following an early career as a maths teacher, Colin completed studies at Oak Hill Theological College before moving into paid ministry, and has also studied at the Irish Baptist College. He is married to Tanya and has three daughters.

• The silhouette of the soul

‘The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out’ (Prov.20:5).

There are movements of the heart that happen deep within our soul. When we stand at the edge of someone’s life and look in, we see their actions and their behaviour like the ripples on the water’s surface, but the depth of the water creates a veil, a shadow that most cannot see through. Proverbs 20:5 gives us hope that though the waters are dark, it is possible, for the one with insight, to peer into the watery depths of a person’s life and catch a glimpse of what is driving them, to decipher the silhouette of their soul. It is possible to see beyond their behaviour and understand the purposes of their heart.

In 2 Timothy 2:15, we are told we need people like Timothy who have the skill to ‘rightly handle the word of truth’, and in 1 Chronicles 12:32 that we need people like the men of Issachar who have the wisdom to ‘understand the times and know what to do’. We also need people who have insight to see the ‘purposes of a person’s heart’. We must never assume when we read our own Bible that our interpretation is flawless, we must never assume that our understanding of the times we live in is without bias, and we must certainly never take for granted that we have a perfect grasp of our own hearts.

‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?’ (Jer.17:9).

Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the Early Church Fathers, understood the depth of the human soul more than most, yet he lamented: ‘I became a great puzzle to myself’. The Frenchman Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century theologian and mathematician, said: ‘the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know’.

Don’t presume that you know yourself. Don’t imagine that you have labelled and categorised the mysteries of your own heart, that you have tamed your desires, or finished the search and examination of your own soul. There are deep waters within us, let us long for, pray for and seek counsel for the insight to peer into those shadows.

We must see more than surface behaviours in a person’s life, but we must also see that behaviour is not random.

‘As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart’ (Prov.27:19).

Behaviour is a window into the soul. Whatever is going on in the deep recesses of our heart, it will show itself in our lives, in our behaviour. It may not always be obvious, it may often require insight, but we are not random creatures – our life reflects our heart.

• Sexuality as a window into the soul

Sexuality is a particularly illuminating window into our soul. Throughout Scripture the connection between spirituality and sexuality is explicit.

‘“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church’ (Eph.5:31).

The union of one flesh is both sexual and spiritual. The physical embrace of sexuality is a shadow of the divine embrace of spirituality. Our spiritual union with Christ is the basis of our union within the fellowship of our Triune God (John 17:20-26).

A union that is personal, intimate, and loving. We are people who are captivated by beauty, driven by desire, and we long for this embrace. A place where it is safe to be seen for who we are, a sanctuary where shame is forgotten.

The struggles that we have deep in our soul will find a way out into our lives and those struggles, those scars that have been infected by sin will echo into both our spirituality and our sexuality. This is a human problem. A problem for all of us. We are far more broken than we realise. We, all of us, are far more broken sexually than we realise. Ever since Genesis, humanity has been hiding:

‘Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. … Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”’ (Gen. 2:25 & 3:8-10).

I’ve been hiding, so have you. The feeling of shame, the impulse to hide – they are ancient echoes running through our soul, habits woven into our spiritual DNA. We hide from God; we hide from others, and we hide from ourselves. Scared to be exposed, afraid to be seen for who we are, terrified that we are not enough. Sin is the fuel of our shame, it tells us that we should be enough by ourselves. It speaks the same lies as that serpent of old – saying that we should be like God, we should be God, then it condemns when we are not.

In our sexuality and in our spirituality, we are hiding. The fear of being seen, the shame of being known. Sexually we give ourselves to lovers who are no lovers at all, but users. Spiritually we give ourselves to gods that are not gods at all, but idols. We fear to be embraced by a real lover, by THE real Lover, because we fear being seen for who we really are, the shame of being known.

So, we hide. We hide alone. We are strangers, even to ourselves. We hide in the arms of lovers that do not love. But we are part of this dance, for though we need to hide we want to be seen, we want to be known, but it’s not safe. We were made to be embraced, sexually and spiritually, we were designed to know and be known, to see and be seen, to love and be loved. But we must hide.

So, we use others, we use lovers, we use idols to get a taste of what it is to be precious, to get a taste of what it is to belong, to get a taste of what it is to be safe in another’s arms. In our shame, we use and let ourselves be used. We consume others and are consumed by them.

But sexually and spiritually, we long for something more, we want to stop hiding, we want to stop using and being used. We want to be seen and known and loved, we want to be precious to someone, to belong with someone, to be safe within their embrace.

We long for someone who sees the beauty within our brokenness, someone who looks on us with eyes of grace, someone who sees us as we truly are and sees past the shame. It is safe to be seen, even in our shame. Because Christ’s embrace is a gracious one. It is the embrace of Christ that makes us beautiful, that removes our shame. He sees the beauty within the brokenness and He mends it. He sees us hiding and He pursues us. He sees our shame and He covers it. He sees our fear and He holds us tight. It costs Him, it cost Him everything. He takes our shame and He pays for it, He suffers that we might be free. It costs Him everything, but He gives it gladly.

Christ’s embrace is a gracious one and, in Him, we are welcomed into the holy embrace that is our Triune God. It is safe to be seen, not because we are shameless, but because in Christ we are made beautiful.

When dealing with the morality of gay marriage or gender fluidity, we need to wrestle with what is right or wrong, but we also need the compassion and the insight to see beyond the behavioural ripples in someone’s life, to see both the sin and the scars deep in the soul; and in seeing, to look with eyes filled with compassion, to show that it is ‘safe to be seen’, and all the time pointing each other to the heavenly Father who sees the prodigal son coming, and His eyes are filled with love and His words say ‘welcome home’.

Yet tender compassion must be married to ethical clarity. So, what does God make of the LGBTQ+ lifestyle?

• What Scripture does and doesn’t say

Scripture is sufficient to give us guidance on this, yet it says only a few things about homosexuality and the occasional thing about transvestism. It does not say gay marriage is wrong, nor that transgender surgery is wrong; because it is not talking about them.

The ancient world was aware of homosexual practice and Scripture deals with it at various points. There is the intended homosexual gang rape in Genesis 19 and Judges 19. There are the male shrine prostitutes connected with idolatry and homosexual activity in Deuteronomy 23:17-19, 1 Kings 14:24 and 2 Kings 23:7. There is pederasty as referenced in Joel 3:3, probably the most common expression of homosexuality in the ancient world and bears a closer relationship to paedophilia than it does to gay marriage. In terms of consensual same-sex behaviour between adults, there are certainly reports of folk in the higher social classes having drunken orgies where people have sex with any and everyone. There is much disagreement about whether long-term committed homosexual relationships existed, though if they did, it would seem be a footnote of history. The world the Bible was written in was not dealing with gay marriage, but with gang rape, shrine prostitution, pederasty, and drunken orgies. We need to let that sink in.

Our queer Christian friend would read about each of those and concur that all those practices are wicked and an attack on God’s way. They would also insist that each of those bears little resemblance to gay marriage.

We need to let that sink in.

Imagine a young evangelical heading off to university. She loves penal substitution atonement, the doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ, Trinitarian theology and the Reformed doctrine of Scripture. She signs up to all of it, gladly. She also grows up around friends who identify as being fluid in their gender and sexualities, friends both inside and outside the church. She cares about these friends, and she finds it odd that God disapproves of their lifestyle. She asks an older evangelical why God sees it as wrong. The older evangelical turns to 1 Timothy 1:10 and tells her that Scripture is clear that gay marriage is wrong. The young evangelical is perplexed, but trusts God and loves the Bible so takes it on faith that her fluid friends, both the Christians and non-Christians, are living in sin. Then when she goes to university, she meets other young Christians who open the Bible and explain that many of the ‘clobber texts’ have been ripped bleeding from their context. God isn’t rebuking LGBTQ+ lifestyles, He is dealing with ancient, dark, immoral, idolatrous practices.

Think about how this young evangelical responds. She feels betrayed. It is not just that she thinks the old evangelicals have made a mistake, she believes they have made a toxic mistake, a wilful mistake fuelled by their bias, their prejudice, their narrowmindedness, their sin. These people who pride themselves on ‘taking the Bible seriously’, these people who work so hard to ‘handle the word of God rightly’ – how could they be so clumsy, how could they be so simplistic and reductionist in their handling of Scripture? The answer she lands on is … Sin.

Her conclusion is not just that she should affirm her queer Christian friends in their lifestyle, she feels that it is incumbent upon her to call the old guard of evangelicalism to repentance. She believes with all her heart that if the old guard in their hard-heartedness won’t listen to the call of God to repent, that she and all faithful, affirming Christians should have nothing to do with them.

Imagine, young passionate Bible-believing Christians, feeling like that. Except we don’t have to imagine. It has begun, and it is well on its way.

We need to stop saying this is an open and shut matter, throwing out proof-texts to make our point. We need to remember how to do hard thinking on complex ethical issues.

• The shape of love

Start with some easy ones – Why is it wrong to murder? Why is it wrong to worship idols? Simple – God’s people were told not to in Exodus 20. Good, but that is not enough, not if we are going to learn how answer harder questions. Are murder and idolatry evil because the commandment prohibiting them makes them evil, or is there a commandment prohibiting them because they are evil? Murder was wrong before Cain turned on Abel. Scripture explains why in Genesis 9:6 – because God has made people in His image, He has designed people with a certain nobility and dignity that means killing a human is against God’s created order. That is why the command not to murder was given. Equally, when Moses came down from Sinai and found the people worshipping the golden calf, when judgment fell, no one complained that idolatry wasn’t wrong because Moses hadn’t come down with the second commandment yet. It wasn’t the second commandment that made it wrong to worship idols, the second commandment was given because there is only one God, the maker of the heavens and the earth. Nothing in creation can bear the weight of worship.

There is much more to say on this but, for now, it is enough to see that God has created things with a particular design and dignity and commandments are often given in specific contexts to articulate how God expects His creation to be respected. Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves. This is the heart of Christian spirituality. But love must be ‘shaped’ by something.

I love my God, I love my wife, I love my cat and I love my smart phone. That is good, but only if each of those ‘loves’ are properly ‘shaped’. I must love my God as God. I must love my wife as a woman made in the image of God who is married to me. I must love my cat as a pet. I must love my smart phone as a piece of technology.

It is not simply a question of whether I love each of them, it is whether the ‘shape of my love’ is appropriate to what they are, do I love each of them rightly. Imagine if I loved my wife as a god. It would be no love at all, it would be an attack on God and it would destroy me and my wife. Imagine if I loved my wife as I ought to love a smart phone. I keep her around as long as she is useful, if she gets a bit slow, I upgrade her to the latest model, if there are too many notifications I select the mute function. It would be no love at all, it would be an attack on the God who made her in His image, it would destroy her and it would certainly destroy me.

What something IS, shapes HOW we should love it, so we must discover God’s design in marriage, sexuality and gender. I do not get to design or decide what I am, I discover what God has made me. My wife is a woman, she is not a god, a man or a beast. Whether I or she or anyone else thinks differently, to love her properly, I must love her as she is.

The secular queer movement is not merely an attack on traditional ideas about sexuality or gender. It is an attack on reality. The secular queer movement sees the boundaries in this world as human constructions, imposed on a blank canvas. And if these boundaries are seen as artificial, any person has the right to redraw these boundaries how they see fit. The goal in life is not to discover God’s design within the world, but to impose your personal design and not feel trapped by someone else’s.

In a godless worldview, there is no inherent form to respect, everything is just dust. People of the dust, cats of the dust, smart phones of the dust, labels are imposed not discovered. Any boundary drawn in the dust is fluid, we design who we are, rather than discover who we are. Ideas about gender and sexuality are fluid lines drawn in the dust by people of the dust.

It is God’s design in creation that gives shape to love; if creation has no design, then love has no shape. If people are not made in the image of God, then HOW do I love them – as a god, as a beast, as a useful tool? Queer theology has adopted this fluid view of the world, so it carries a Trojan horse, an error that on the surface sounds like it is infused with love, when in fact it carries the machinery to make love formless, without shape or content.

My plea is to young evangelicals who love God and love Scripture, to those wrestling with sexuality and gender, and to those seeking to love and support others on this journey – let’s keep talking. The day of clobber texts needs to be over, we need a new day, where we see through the deep waters of a person’s life to get a glimpse of their soul, where we see God’s amazing creation, both the beauty and the brokenness, where we stop needing to hide from each other and together, we search the Scriptures afresh that we might know how to love each other as Christ has loved us.