Spent the weekend thinking about the consequences of bad theology. Theology matters and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it. If you believe something stupid and untrue about God and humanity, it’s going to affect the way you live. You may believe yourself to be above the baseness of irrationality, but if you believe something dumb, you’re going to end up acting in accordance with that belief.
I’ll use myself as an example, because I am prone to narrow mindedness. I could point fingers…well, who am I kidding, I will point my fingers, but first I will point them at myself so you won’t go around thinking I’m a hypocrite. I may be one, but I don’t want you to think so.
So I am a cradle Anglican, with a goodly measure of jumbled evangelicalism swirled into the mix. The Anglicanism is a rebellion against all the evangelicalism. The evangelicalism is because, well, I just am. You have to land somewhere and I’m not trending catholic, so it has to be the other way. Anglicans have some kind of decent understanding of the body. I’m going to go with the aesthetic sense here, and say nothing of official teaching. If you hang about with Anglicans you will probably have the chance to enjoy a good bottle of wine and hear some funny, perhaps slightly inappropriate, jokes. If you go to church, which you should do, you will get to see candles and color and hear nice music, hopefully. You will attend to the scripture and have to get out of your pew and go forward to cup your hands to receive a ruff little piece of bread, a wafer, and have a sip of strong wine, strong enough to make you cough as you walk away. You will have to participate with your body as well as with your mind. Knowing that your mind is just as broken as your body, the mind and body are engaged together to pull and compel you toward God. Sure, if you’re a ditsy teenager, you can disengage and let the whole mess of it wash over you without caring at all, but if you believe, there is so so so much help in the liturgy itself to bring you to some decent knowledge and understanding about God. And then you wander into coffee hour and listen to people complaining and being funny.
Furthermore, there is a rhythm in Anglicanism of feasting and fasting. Sometimes you are encouraged to say no to yourself, to the things you want, to a way of thinking. Sometimes you are encouraged to feast, to overdo it on the flowers and go ahead and have a piece of cake. There is an even balance between the need to sometimes say yes and often to say no. The body isn’t bad. The needs of the body aren’t bad. But you can’t have unbridled license.
So anyway, here comes the evangelical bit. And remember, first, I am one, and second, I’m not talking official doctrine and theology, I’m talking about the ideas you pick up when you’re half listening, when you’re living with other people in a certain kind of way. What beliefs are conveyed? Perhaps not from the pulpit so much but from the way people are ordering their lives. In that world, the evangelical one, there’s a hefty lot of saying no. The brokenness of the body is privileged over the brokenness of the mind. Your mind can understand and when it does, your body will do what it’s supposed to, and in the meantime No, don’t do that. Don’t wear that, don’t drink that, don’t say that, don’t read that, don’t talk about that, don’t eat that, don’t think about that. What can you do? You can read the bible and pray every day. You can make and eat sensible food. You can close your eyes during the sermon to shut out the plain white walls and the weird fake plants up on the stage. You can try really hard, during the sermon, to gin up a feeling of love for God and the jerk sitting next to you.
It was in this world, this world of No, that I began to have the wrong idea about the theological word Flesh. ‘Do not’ as the verse goes, ‘make any provision for the flesh.’ Is this in the bible? It is, unfortunately. You can blame Paul because he wrote it in there, in Greek no less. The flesh, in a technical way, is the way Paul refers to the natural propensity to sin to which every single human being is shackled. I have a sin nature. I am of the flesh. I would like to not sin but I am going to anyway. I am fleshly. Sin crouches at my door, ready to do me in all the time. And I mean, absolutely, my body is often leading the way in that enslavement. The flesh, you know, the body, it’s so bad.
Do you see how easily I slipped? Paul isn’t talking about the ordinariness of the body. He is talking about sin nature. When he says, ‘do not make any provision for the flesh’, he means, don’t make plans to sin. Don’t sit up thinking about how you’re going to do it. Don’t make it easy for yourself. Of course you’re going to sin, you’re a sinner, but you should struggle against it, not just give in to something that’s going to happen anyway. Making provision for the flesh doesn’t mean (as I gradually came to believe it did) thinking ahead in the day to when you’ll have a chance to get off your feet, drink a hot cup of tea, and read a snatch of something. It doesn’t mean carefully setting your table and buying a really nice bottle of wine for Christmas dinner. It doesn’t mean finding and buying a beautiful dress that suits you and is a pleasure to wear. Making no provision for the flesh doesn’t mean saying no to absolutely everything having to do with the body. It is the rhythm of the body’s life that makes it hard for Satan to induce and tempt you into sin. If you sit down and enjoy a cup of tea when you’re tired, you are grounded in reality, suddenly, the mind can calm, you can look out the window, you can just be. (That’s not my idea, it’s that clever C.S. Lewis.)
Fortunately for me, I was so busy carrying on with the rhythm of the church year, and even the ordinary happenings of each day, that I wasn’t really living as if I had conflated Paul’s Flesh with my own Body, but I was carrying around a big lugging burden of guilt. I felt really bad every time I looked ahead to something enjoyable. I felt like I ought to always be denying myself all the time. At some point the guilt became really unbearable, enough so that I happened to mention it to my husband, who is way smarter than me, and who easily untangled the confusion with his awesome knowledge of Greek. How lame and patriarchal is that.
The reason I was thinking about it all again this weekend, as you can imagine, is because of the wretched Ashley Madison scandal. It’s not surprising that many people in places of power and wealth would have an overinflated sense of their own invincibility. They might willfully forget that the Internet is not really secure. They might shove down the deep mysterious knowledge that life really isn’t that short, that it goes on for ever and ever amen. They might convince themselves that they ‘deserve better’, that ‘it’s not that big of a deal’, ‘no one’s really getting hurt’. All these are delicate lies whispered into the ear when you want to do something and have only got to push Pay Now to make it happen. It is tragic, but understandable. But what of the Christians in that mess? The ones who say they are anyway, the Josh Duggars.
Shock and horror to find his name there is appropriate, I think, because it shouldn’t be there. He has professed a certain set of beliefs, he has held himself up as a model of those beliefs, and so anger and sorrow are totally appropriate when it’s discovered he was acting contrary to them. But, you know, I wonder, how did he get there? Along the way, how did he come to push the pay button and have a stupid foolish extra Facebook page? I don’t want to see inside his mind. He’s a wretched sinner, like me, and that would be unpleasant. No, what about his theology could have contributed? If anything?
I ask all these questions and know that it’s not really any of my business. Lots of ugly stuff has been written about the quiver full movement. I guess I get really uncomfortable any time Christians align themselves with any thing that can be described as a movement, when one theological idea overtakes the whole picture and everything else has to serve it. It happens on the right and the left all the time. But having sojourned in the theological world of No, I wonder if the guilt and the deprivations in that world, for some, are just too much to bear. I know they would have been for me if I had stayed there.
Clearly, going onto Ashley Madison is making provision for the flesh. It is waiting and planning to sin. But meanwhile, he has a lovely wife at home, who is having baby after baby. Was there any provision for the body, for being with her? Did he think ahead to that? Or did the category of No cover everything so much that he had to just go sin? Sex with your own wife isn’t supposed to be awful. It isn’t supposed to be like eating tater tot casserole, sensible and nourishing. It’s supposed to be more like spending slightly too much on flowers and then going ahead to finish off the bottle of wine. It’s supposed to be a Feast, something lovely.
I think, I’m not sure, but I wonder if that where there are no aesthetic categories of loveliness and feasting, the crouching sin at the door is a greater ugly force than it needs to be.
One thing I do know. Of whatever kind of flavor or brand of Christian you are–Anglican Evangelical, Presbyterian Evangelical, Weirdo Evangelical–the saving mercy and grace of Jesus’ own body, his own perfect flesh, are there. All of us with our wrong ideas and our actual sin can go to him for forgiveness. I hope and pray that not just Josh Duggar, but everyone whose lives are spinning in sorrow, will call out to him and be saved.
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