Christians must recover the lost notion of ‘modesty’, according to a leading pastor and theologian – and not take naked showers with fellow team members after sports like rugby.
Believers ‘need to rediscover the Biblical category of “modesty” – a rather fundamental character of the people of God in the Bible which has lost prominence recently in the West,’ he says.
Jason Ward, vice chair of Church Society, and minister of St Mary’s, Chaddesden, Derby, also says Christians should avoid looking at unclothed women in classical works of art.
Writing in scholarly Reformed journal The Global Anglican, Ward says: ‘Though modesty is not a straightforward rule or command, it is a value or principle expected of all Christians, male and female.’
Surveying the Old Testament, Ward concludes: ‘The words and texts which deal with nudity or lack of clothing tend to link concepts of lack, emptiness, undress and by extension therefore, genitals, sex, disgrace and poverty.
‘The close connection of shame to nakedness after the early chapters of Genesis demonstrates the Old Testament understanding that being naked outside of marriage was always shameful. Nakedness was not tolerated outside of proper sexual relationships.’
Pointing to Exodus 20:26, where priests are to be careful about accidentally exposing themselves before God, Ward claims: ‘Our reproductive organs carry an objective shame before God as well as cultural shame before each other which other parts of the body do not.’ This is ‘not accommodation to human thinking so much as the provision of a lasting metaphor for our instruction (much as marriage is),’ he states.
When it comes to the New Testament, he says that ‘precisely the same ideas that are wrapped up in the various words and texts which talk about nudity in the Old Testament’ are found.
Thus when considering these issues, Christians should remember it is not simply a matter of lust but ‘the shame in society and before God that nakedness instantly confers to the person: I will be shamed if I am found naked – whether another lusts or not’.
He asks: ‘May a Christian go to a nudist beach? Pose naked for an art class? Shower together in a group after a game of rugby? This study would suggest not. Not because of lust, but because of modesty.’
When it comes to art, Ward says Christians should steer clear of pictures such as the Venus of Botticelli and Manet’s 1863 Olympia, saying the woman in the latter has ‘humiliated herself’. Nor should believers draw a naked model at an art class, he suggests.
However, Ward does say that a Christian ‘is permitted to reveal their most intimate parts to a doctor, say, in order to remove a kidney stone’, as well as in marriage.
