Christian Cliches: "Do Not Deny One Another"

"Do not deny one another" is a misquoted fragment of a passage in 1 Corinthians 7.  Here is the whole passage, from the New American Standard Version, with the words in question in italics:

Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband. The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. But this I say by way of concession, not of command. Yet I wish that all men were even as I myself am. However, each man has his own gift from God, one in this manner, and another in that. But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. 1 Corinthians 7:1-8.

This passage is often used to shame marital partners (and particularly women) for refusing sex to their spouse.  He has authority over her body, and though concessions are usually given for her ill health, she is expected to not only consent, but to joyfully desire sex with her husband at all times. Although under this verse the same would apply to the husband, it is usually the wife who is made the primary subject of this teaching.

This Christian website illustrates what I'm talking about.

Paul advocated marriage as a way to avoid sinful sex.
Because this is one motivator for marriage, it becomes ridiculous to enter into marriage and then deny your spouse the very thing that helped drive him or her to marriage. . . Sex is to be exclusively available between a husband and wife to quench their desire for sex. But what sense is it to have a well and then refuse any to drink from it? Hence, Paul stated in I Corinthians 7 that neither the husband or wife have authority over their own bodies. When they married they gave themselves over to each other.

The result is to argue that there can be no such thing as spousal rape.

With the arrival of feminism came the idea that a woman has full control over her body. . . If she doesn't want to have sex, then a husband does not have the right to request sex from her. However, these ideas are in direct contradiction to the plain teachings in I Corinthians 7. It views the husband and wife relationship as independant and perhaps advesarial [sic] instead of a union work toward the benefit of both. . . At the root of feminism is drive to separate husband and wives. . .

The act of marriage includes consent to sex. A husband can abuse his relationship by forcing sex on his wife, and such abuse is sinful, but it should not be labeled "rape." By labeling such abuse "rape," a fundamental view of marriage is changed to state that consent to sex is a moment-by-moment decision that can be granted or denied at the whim of the spouse. Yet the biblical view (and the view held by civil law until recently) is that consent is a part of the marriage relationship. It doesn't come and go at either spouse's whim. "Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does" (I Corinthians 7:3-4). A husband or wife claiming to withdraw consent to sex during marriage is violating a term of the marriage covenant and, therefore, in sin.

Julie Anne over at Spiritual Sounding Board quotes a similar website:

We believe the teaching on marital rape is a poison in the well of women’s hearts and minds towards their husbands and marriage & does much damage. However, we also do not condone a husband taking his wife against her will and strongly state that a man should not do so. In situations of repeated and enduring refusal, professional help and Matthew 18 need to be worked through & not force to be used. 

We also believe that denying a spouse sex is just as much abuse as forcing sex upon a spouse. [Emphasis added.]

The sad thing about this is how (in a society where power was concentrated in the hands of the man) Paul's careful wording throughout this chapter makes the husband and the wife passages parallel, of equal weight and balance.  Paul said (in a society where marriage was generally required) that followers of Christ were under no obligation to marry. However, if they did marry, each should fulfill their marital duties to one another .  It's interesting to note how, in contrast to our current age where the emphasis would have to be placed on not demanding sex, Paul writes in terms of not withholding sex.  But the whole emphasis of this passage is mutuality and equal consideration.  To use it as a way to bend one spouse to the other's will flies in the face of the teaching as a whole; it is simply opposite to the way it was intended.  And to use it to claim that saying "no" is "just as much abuse" as marital rape is harmful in the extreme.

The fact is that this passage cannot be construed as commanding marital sex, because it explicitly says marital sex is granted as "a concession, not a command."  Jesus had taught that marriage was not a requirement of God's kingdom, and thus, neither was sex:  "[T]here are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it [Matthew 19-12, NIV]." In the 1 Cor. 7 passage, Paul declares himself as one of these when he says "I wish that all men were even as I myself am."  According to Robin Lane Fox (Oxford New College, Ancient History) in his book Pagans and Christians, celibacy became a definitive Christian virtue very early in Christianity's history:

From its very beginnings, Christianity . . . considered an orderly sex life to be a clear second best to no sex life at all. It has been the protector of an endangered Western species: people who remain virgins from birth to death. [p. 355]

This trend continued until Martin Luther and Protestantism reversed it, extolling the virtues of married life, hearth and home and advocating the destruction of monasteries and convents. But the reason Paul emphasized "do not deprive" rather than "do not force" was probably because the tendency in the early church was to resist having marital sex, rather than trying to get it more often! Fox tells us that by the second century after Christ, this concept had grown to the point where sexless marriages, far from the tragedy they are viewed as today, were held up as the virtuous ideal:

[T]he idea of sexless cohabitation was urged, and practiced, by married Christian couples. p. 356. 

Though orthodoxy opposed this extreme and eventually defeated it,[Pagans and Christians, p. 358], the celibacy of Christ Himself must have provided a strong incentive for imitation, and this is probably why Paul (himself celibate) had to write in terms of sex as a marital obligation which should not be shirked, rather than as a marital pleasure which should not be demanded or forced.

Today, however, 1 Corinthians 7:5 often becomes a weapon to shame a married partner (and especially a wife) for saying "no," and 1 Corinthians 7:4 is used to disclaim the existence of marital rape-- as if having "authority" over one another's bodies didn't include the authority to tell your spouse's body, "Stop!"

It's also interesting the way the word translated "deprive" above often gets changed to "deny" when quoted as a cliche.  The Greek word there is "apostereo," which is translated "defraud" in the King James version.  Vines Expository Dictionary defines it as "to rob, despoil, defraud" -- which implies permanently taking something away from someone. The Scripture4All online Interlinear translates it as "depriving," as many translations also do.  The word certainly does appear to mean something much stronger than "Not tonight, honey."

Sheila at To Love, Honor and Vacuum puts it this way:

Deprive is not the same as refuse. I believe many people interpret this verse to mean refuse. Are women obligated to have sex every time a man wants it? Are we ever allowed to refuse?

Well, let’s look more closely at deprive. 

If I were to say to you, “do not deprive your child of good food,” what am I implying? I’m saying that your child should get the food that is commonly recognized for good health: three healthy meals a day, with some snacks. I am not saying that every time your child pulls at your leg and says, “Mommy, can I have a bag of cheetos?” that you have to say yes. You are not depriving your child of good food by refusing a request for Cheetos.
Deprive implies that there is a level of sexual activity that is necessary for a healthy marriage. . .

But it does not mean that it is every single time a person wants sex. 

The fact that the preceding verses in 1 Corinthians 7 say that the husband’s body is the wife’s, and the wife’s body is the husband’s, implies that one person cannot and must not force himself or herself onto the other person. And by force I’m not talking about just physical force. There’s emotional blackmail, there’s shutting down, there’s telling someone, “you’re just not good enough”. . . 

Let’s assume that it’s the wife with the lower libido for a minute (though it certainly isn’t always) and look at it this way: 

If her husband’s body belongs to her, then she has the ability to also say, “I do not want you using your body sexually right now with me.” 

If she feels sick, or is really sad, or is exhausted, then her having ownership of his body also means that she can say, “I just can’t right now” without needing to feel guilty–if she is at the same time not depriving him. 

I believe that the admonition “do not deprive each other” refers to the relationship as a whole, not to each individual moment.

So if, in the relationship as a whole, you are having regular and frequent sex, then if one of you says, “not tonight”, that is not depriving. That is simply refusing for right now. [Emphases in original.]

I would not go so far as this author does, to equate "authority" (Greek word "exousia," meaning, "having rights/power of choice over") with "ownership," but I think the rest of what she says is spot on. It seems to me that to require your spouse to have sex with you any time you want it, regardless of your spouse's feelings on the matter, is the attitude of--let's face it-- a jerk.  Only six chapters later, in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul sets forth how love is patient, not self-seeking, and how it doesn't dishonor others.  Having sex with someone who really doesn't want to have sex with you, but just gives in because she's not supposed to say no, is not only unloving, it's unhealthy. The Love, Honor and Vacuum blog linked above posted a comment by "Kelly" that says it so well, I'd like to close with it here too:

Yep, some of the comments you read by men on these marriage websites are precisely why Christian women are beginning to advise each other not to risk marrying a Christian man! (I’m not kidding). Look, guys, here’s a quick lesson in the blindingly obvious: there’s no quicker way to make sex unappealing to your wife than by demanding it, regardless of how she feels. No better way of making yourself unattractive and frankly repellent than by sexual coercion. No no effective way of losing your wife’s respect – she wants a real man, not some oaf (because if you can enjoy sex knowing the other person isn’t enjoying it, there’s something very wrong with you). And really, no one past the age of 14 should need telling that. Of COURSE, a sexless marriage has problems that need addressing. Of COURSE you should ask if you want more/different sex to be happy. Of COURSE you can explain to her why sexual rejection hurts. But here’s a little clue (again from the ‘stating the obvious’ files): why do I enjoy nothing more than making love with my husband? Why can I not keep my hands off him? Why am I keen to give him pleasure even if I’m occasionally not in the mood or unable to participate myself? Because, while making it obvious he finds me desirable, he also wouldn’t WANT to have sex with me unless I was an enthusiastic participant. Because he can’t stand the idea of it being a one-way experience.

So if you're one of those who has been on the receiving end of biblical coercion like this-- I hope you'll find a way to let go of the shame and manipulation, and be free.  God never intended the Bible to be used as a set of regulations that turns fun into duty and intimacy into a burden.  If you need sexual counseling in your marriage, I hope you go get some.  If you're a victim of marital rape or abuse, I hope you'll begin to take steps so you don't have to subject yourself to that.

But if you and/or your spouse are just laboring under a heavy burden of "Don't deny one another," placed on you by religious people who don't know you, your marriage or your spouse-- Christ said His yoke is easy and His burden is light.  Lay down that burden and enjoy one another, and the good gifts of God.

"Raised by Strangers"

It's a mantra that I've heard repeated many times, especially in Christian circles.  "A good mother stays home full-time.  Don't let your children be raised by strangers!"

"Raised by strangers."  What mom would want that for her kids?  So I believed, as a young Christian married woman, that of course God would provide a way for me to not work outside the home.  After all, staying home with my kids full-time was what I wanted as a young mother, right?  I mean, if I were really following God's will for my life, this was what I should want.  And this was obviously what was best both for me and for my children, right?  I mean, if God designed it that way, then that's how it should work best!

The problem was that the only way we could have given up my income while simultaneously incurring the costs of infant care was by going on welfare, which (we were taught) was also totally a no-no for good Christians.  We had to choose, it seemed, between being out of God's will one way, or being out of God's will another way.  What was being demanded of us was actually impossible.

So I went back to work after maternity leave-- as part-time as we could afford, but I did go back to work. And I thought God had let me down, because He was supposed to provide so that I wouldn't have to work outside the home.  I also felt guilty because I really liked my job as a legal assistant, which meant, apparently, that I didn't love my kids enough to really want to stay home with them full time.

But working part-time seemed like the best thing to do in our situation.  So that's what we did.

I increased my hours gradually as the children grew up. And I'm very grateful to my boss for being so family-friendly. A lot of women don't have the options he gave me.

It ended up working out just fine for our kids-- and for us, their parents.

I'm not going to cite a bunch of statistics here, or sociological studies or expert opinions on children being in daycare.  Frankly, when I researched this on the Internet, I found that the whole thing is very complicated.  For every study or expert supporting one position, there's another expert or study supporting the opposite.  Practically speaking, the outcomes for children depend not so much on whether or not they're in non-parental child care, but on the quality of the care, the income and education of the family, and the quality of the parenting the kids receive when they're not in day care.

There is one thing I am certain of, though.  There's such a thing as prejudicial language, which is defined as "loaded or emotive terms used to attach value or moral goodness [or badness] to believing the proposition."  And if ever a phrase constituted prejudicial language, "raised by strangers" is such a phrase.

My children weren't "raised by strangers."  I mean, let's look at this practically.  Even with both parents working full time (which wasn't true in our house anyway until the kids reached school age), a child still is at home a lot.  There was breakfast time, dinner time, chore time, playtime, bath time, bedtime. And weekends. And holidays.  And sick days, when the day cares said, "Not in here. You have to keep your kid home."  Some parents risk losing paid hours, or even their jobs, in that situation!  I could only be grateful my boss was supportive and that I had plenty of paid sick leave and vacation time.

Also, guess what-- once you meet a person who is going to take care of your children, you begin to develop a relationship based around the commonality of that child, and she isn't a stranger anymore! I found it was important to me that the children be in home-based day care rather than classroom-type day care, so that's what I picked (and I was privileged to have this option-- a lot of women don't, so we need to cut them some slack!)  What I didn't have was any relative, any grandmother or aunt, who lived in the area and could watch the kids.  But the children grew to love their caregivers as they would a grandmother or aunt.  Did the lack of blood ties really matter?  Both children were happy and secure in their daycare settings, looked forward to going, and enjoyed coming home to be with me as well.

So why are we as Christians putting such burdens and laying such guilt trips on parents who are doing the best they can?

The Bible, in fact, never addresses how much time a mother is supposed to be home with her children.  The Proverbs 31 woman, who is held up so often as the example Christian women should strive to follow, apparently spent quite a bit of time away from home and family, doing things like buying fields, planting vineyards, and selling linen garments to merchants.

It's also important to remember that today's nuclear family was simply not what Paul had in mind when he talked about parenting in the New Testament, because such a thing didn't exist. I mean, of course there was such a thing as a mother, father and children, but they generally were just part of a larger household, and the majority of people were actually slaves. Almost everyone lived in household units that also functioned as economic units, with one older patriarch as ruler of the family, his slaves, wife and children (adult sons, with their wives, and minor children) who were all expected to obey him. Most mothers didn't and couldn't take care of their children full time. The patriarch's wife would spend most of her time managing the household and the servants. Slave women worked in the fields or took care of their mistress's children, presumably leaving their own young children to be cared for by older family members who were past the age of harder work.

This idea that a child can only grow up healthy if her mom is there 24-7 is really a fairly modern invention-- and even now is an option only available to fairly well-off families.  Most women throughout history have not been able to be full-time mothers.  Most women today are not able to be full-time mothers.  In fact, many women (like myself, I discovered, when I was honest with myself) end up discovering they're not suited for or happy staying home full time.

What if God didn't design all women alike?  What if "raised by strangers" is really just rhetoric being used to shame women into staying in a traditional role?

What I say is, no two families are alike, and we all need to just do the best we can given who we are and our situations, and not place burdens on ourselves or each other that are too difficult to bear.

Reunion

In the early 1980s I was in college, living on fraternity/sorority row.  But it wasn't a sorority house.  It was the local branch of Maranatha Christian Churches/Campus Ministries founded by Bob and Rose Weiner.  As I have described here and here, Maranatha was a Christian group with strong authoritarian control.   We lived in the Maranatha House and went to church in the meeting room of that house, and we slept on the sleeping porches on the third floor and tried to get our homework done or hold down our jobs, despite endless outreach meetings, prayer meetings and other Maranatha obligations.

On Labor Day this year, 29 years after gradating from college, I went to an annual get-together of  a long-standing group of former Maranatha members from my college town.  The ties I have with these people are very strong, indeed practically unbreakable.  As we ate and talked, laughed and took pictures and caught up on one another's lives, I found myself wondering what it is that binds us together so closely, after almost 30 years.

It's certainly not because we still agree on everything the way we did back then, when we had all the right answers to all the right questions and knew how big a part our group of "God's Green Berets" was playing in the advance of God's "dominion mandate."  It's not because we stayed physically close; though some members still live in the same city, some of us have been scattered long distances. And it's not because we spend our time together living in the past; in fact, I don't think the word "Maranatha" or our experiences there came up once in any of the conversations I had at the reunion this year.

No, the bonds run much deeper than that.

It probably helps that all of us in this group of former members somehow managed to stay married to the spouses we met in Maranatha (which seems a miracle in itself!), and that we all had kids and got jobs and watched the kids grow up-- in short, that we have lived basically similar middle-class lives. And we did all remain Christians.  But those are really just general similarities-- and we have met at least once a year since our children were in infant carriers, and now most of those kids are in college or have finished school and moved out-- but we have not grown apart.

The thing is this.  Even if we don't always talk about our shared histories, the fact is that for several intense years we lived together and ate and slept and washed together (though of course boys and girls chastely slept and showered in separated areas).  We rotated the cooking and cleaning, and we played games in the dining/fireside room and helped each other with homework and gave each other Christmas presents.

We held car washes almost every Saturday of every summer to try to pay expenses for the house's upkeep.  We saved as much as we could to buy oil for the ancient furnace.  When school started, and again in the spring, we had six to eight weeks of meetings every night and were required to hand out flyers for these meetings on campus right after dinner.  There were also shorter "outreach" periods (2-4 weeks each, with meetings 3-4 times a week) at other points during the year.  Once a month we piled into cars and drove to Seattle for a "Maranatha Leadership Training Seminar."  I'm really not sure why we didn't all flunk out of school!

Several times a year we fasted and prayed for up to three days, and sometimes we held all-night prayer meetings, joined via satellite to other Maranatha congregations all over the globe.  (I remember one year the central leadership found out that it's better not to expect even young, strong college kids to pray all night and fast at the same time.  After several kids collapsed, fasting and all-night prayer were never observed at the same time again!  The leadership was actually lucky that no serious health problems resulted that they might have been held legally liable for.)

Whenever we could snatch any spare time, we'd go to movies together (if approved by the local leaders) or watch TV.  One of the girls' favorite activities was to listen to me read stories aloud (Winnie the Pooh, or the Chronicles of Narnia), while they did embroidery or cross-stitch.  (I was glad to be the reader because I loved to read aloud and secretly hated cross stitch, though as a woman I was supposed to like such things.)

We shared with each other the details of our lives and our troubles with parents or siblings.  We bundled up together when the furnace broke down from advanced arthritis or stopped for lack of fuel. We swam together in the house's swimming pool when it was hot (I'm sure the car wash money helped pay for pool treatment chemicals too).  We all knew what each of us looked like in the mornings before showers. We all knew what we looked like in the middle of the night without sleep.

All of this stays with us, even when we don't talk about it.  We have talked about it, of course-- at great length, over the years.  We walked with each other on our journeys out of authoritarian, spiritually abusive religion too.  And it turns out that what we have done together is something pretty rare-- the fact that Maranatha Christian Churches voluntarily disbanded in the early 1990s meant that we could leave Maranatha without shunning or estrangement-- that we were able to come out together.

And though we don't necessarily all agree anymore except on foundational Christian doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation, Atonement and Resurrection, we have all, I think, learned certain things from that journey out.

What have we learned?  I think it boils down to this:  that ultimately, there is no value in trying to force one another, or ourselves, to conform to some cookie-cutter standard of who or what we're supposed to be.  That each of us, in our own selves, is essentially and foundationally valuable.  And that our relationships with one another are more important than any differences we might have.

If nothing else good came out of being in a spiritually abusive religious group, this did: that in reaction to authoritarian control, we let go, once and for all, of any desire to control one another. Instead, we simply love one another.

And that should last us another 30 years, and beyond.

The Purity Conversation - My Two Cents

It appears to have started with a blog post called I am Damaged Goods by Sarah Bessey, in which she says:



In the face of our sexually-dysfunctional culture, the Church longs to stand as an outpost of God’s ways of love and marriage, purity and wholeness.And yet we twist that until we treat someone like me – and, according to this research, 80% of you are like me – as if our value and worth was tied up in our virginity.
[Emphasis in original.]

And then other bloggers weighed in.  Elizabeth Esther with Virginity, New and Improved!  Rachel Held Evans with Do Christians Idolize Virginity?  Sarah Markley with Two Different Things.  Perfect Number with Purity for the Sake of Purity.  Leanne Penny with Red Yarn, Purity and My Misplaced Worth.  Hopeful Leigh with The Morning After.  And many more. 

The Deeper Story (where Sarah Bessey blogs) even created a link list entitled Impromptu Sex Week, in which her fellow blogger Preston states:

[T]here have been a number of conversations cropping up around the blogosphere about sexuality and church. . . [W]e hope that as these important issues are continued conversation for all of us, we can all further listen and understand one another and our unique perspectives.

So I've decided to join the conversation too. 

I don't think it's a coincidence that this conversation sprang up at around the same time as the Superbowl.  As Perfect Number states in her blog post a few days earlier called Women are Your Reward for Being Awesome!:

It may be true that portraying half of the human population as objects that exist only for men's entertainment, whose only use is in their sexuality, somehow causes people to buy more of whatever you're selling.
But if that's true, something is terribly terribly wrong with our society.

[Emphasis in original]

I think reduction of women to sexuality for the sake of men's entertainment, and reduction of women to purity for the sake of Christian ideals (which is usually unintended by Christian ministries, but happens just the same), are just two sides of the same coin.  Either way, women are reduced.  

As Elizabeth Esther put it in with Virginity, New and Improved!, 

Christians say that the world objectifies women through immodest dress and a permissive sexual ethic. However, by idolizing sexual purity and preoccupying ourselves with female modesty and an emphasis on hyper-purity, Christians actually engage in reverse objectivization.  

[Emphasis in original.]
 

"Reduced" is itself an ironic word.  Women are also reduced by the voices-- Christian and non-Christian alike-- that tell them their age and the size of their bodies are also indicators of their worth.  What it comes down to in Superbowl culture is, "If you're young, thin and sexy, you can become a man's reward and the object of his desire."  And in Christian culture, it's "If you're young, thin and virginal, you can become a man's reward and the object of his desire." 

Hooray.  Just what we women always wanted. 

I was a virgin on my wedding night.  And yes, I bought into the Christian idea that this somehow made me better than other women.  I still think I had a reason to be proud of myself for self-control, just as when I'm dieting I can be proud when I say "no" to the piece of cake.  But in truth, neither of these things gives me greater worth in God's eyes than I already had, just for being worth dying on a cross for. 

When it comes right down to it, there are good reasons for dieting (I want to be in better health) and there were good reasons for abstinence before marriage (for me, I think what it really came down to is that I'm a private person, and I didn't want to share that most-private part of myself with anyone who had not already committed to love me and live as one with me).  But to be a more pleasing object, to men or to God, is not a good reason. 

In Maranatha Campus Ministries, the coercive religious group I belonged to when I got married, purity was taken to ridiculous extremes.  This was long before today's purity and courtship movements, but Maranatha had what they called "the dating revelation," which meant that instead of dating, when you began to have feelings for someone in the church (looking anywhere else was out of the question), you went and talked to the pastor (if you were a guy) or to the pastor's wife (if you were a girl), and then the church leaders (we didn't really have elders, since none of us were over 35 and most of us under 30) would pray over the match and "hear from God" as to whether it was His will.

In one way this was better than today's purity/courtship movement, which insists that people should deny and suppress any feelings they have for the opposite sex until after they have been brought together.  Maranatha believed that if the match was from God, so were the feelings.  It was God putting the love in your heart for that other person-- unless, of course, the leaders didn't feel a "witness in their spirits" when they prayed, in which case those feelings were just from the flesh, sister, and you'd better pray and fast till they went away.

Once my husband and I were brought together by the church leaders, we were given the big lecture on staying pure until the wedding day.  This meant not doing anything that might tempt one another.  No kissing (our first kiss was supposed to be at the altar).  No touching (hey, holding hands wasn't exactly wrong, but did you really want to give the devil a foothold?)  Even a neck rub could be a problem, so better just not start. 

And all of this was presented in terms of, "We're not trying to control you; make your own decisions about this.  But these are our guidelines, and we believe we have wisdom in this."  But I remember one couple who got engaged shortly before we did, and decided that they were going to hold hands and kiss (I'm not talking about French kissing, just a peck on the lips) before the wedding day were treated with deep disapproval and held up to us as a negative, shameful example.  But no, there was no control going on here.  Nothing to see.  Just move on.

So my future husband and I, being deeply in love and desperately wanting/needing to learn to relate to one another physically as well as verbally/mentally/spiritually, found some silly ways to get around the rules.

I remember how when we were on the beach or in the woods, we'd take long blades of grass or tall weed stems and tickle one another on the neck and arms, giggling and flirting while we tried to avoid the tickles ourselves while getting in as many as we could on one another.

I remember how on a long drive home from my husband's sister's wedding, I took a piece of cloth and put it over my hand in order to massage his aching neck and shoulders.

I remember how sometimes we'd take a short stick and hold it between us as we walked, instead of holding hands. 

I also remember thinking how odd it was that before we were engaged, we could hug one another as all church members did, but now that we were officially together, we could no longer even do that.  "What do I do if she's crying about something?  I can't comfort her!" my husband once said in desperation to one of his friends who was also engaged.  "I know.  We have to find a sister to do it, or just leave her be," was the reply. 

Looking back on it now, my husband and I are bemused and a little embarrassed.  How could we have had so little faith in ourselves and in the grace of God, that a hug, a neck rub, holding hands or even a kiss would be more than we could handle and would end in steamy windows in the back seat of a car?   Neither of us wanted our first time to be like that-- we both wanted a quiet honeymoon suite to try in peace and privacy the techniques set out in Tim LaHaye's Christian sex manual The Act of Marriage.  (Ironically, this and other sexual-technique materials were required reading in Maranatha's mandatory pre-marital counseling.  I think it was a good idea to give us some advance preparation for that night when the sexual light-switch was somehow supposed to switch from full-off to full-on, but it was hard to read about doing all these things when apart, and then be unable even to touch when we met in person.)

But that's the way it was.  Ideology mattered more than human beings.  A thing called "purity" was more important than a thing called "common sense."  And even though Maranatha enforced these rules on guys and girls alike, it was on the females that shame for non-compliance fell most harshly.

Despite its claim to honor women unlike "the world" that objectifies them, today's purity/courtship culture (just like Maranatha's earlier one) many times objectifies women just as much, and for the same reasons.  Women exist not for themselves, but for others, and particularly for men.  

The Westminster Shorter Catechism says, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever."  But the purity teaching says, "The chief end of woman is to glorify man and be enjoyed by him, and it is incumbent upon man to keep her pure for these ends."

And when the Superbowl culture says "The chief end of woman is to glorify man and be enjoyed by him" and only leaves out that last idea that she should be kept pure-- then all I can see is the church upholding the traditions of men rather than the gospel of Christ. 

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. . .  The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. . . But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.  Romans 8:1-11.

It's good to wait until marriage, if we do it because we're walking in the Spirit.  But walking in condemnation because we didn't wait-- that's also of the flesh.

And reducing women to objects of the flesh in the name of purity?

As far as I can see, that is the most fleshly of all. 

My Wish-I-Hadn'ts

I have, over the course of years that I've been a Christian, changed the way I think about a large number of things.  Some of the beliefs I used to hold caused me to treat people (or even myself) in ways that I'm sure now were not what Jesus wanted.  Though I'm sure I have His grace and forgiveness for these things, that doesn't change the harm I now believe I did.  So here are some of my regrets.  Some of them, as I look back, make me laugh or shake my head; others make me very sad.  If anyone who reads this was affected by any of these things, I hope you already know how truly sorry I am. 

So here, in no particular order, are my Wish-I-Hadn'ts:

I wish I hadn't kept bothering my Catholic co-worker with invitations to my church's events, even though she had told me she had her own faith.  I thought I was trying to get her away from a false religion.  She thought I was just plain annoying.

I wish I hadn't had my pastor preach a how-to-get-saved sermon at my wedding, to the captive audience of relatives and friends who had only come to see me get married.

I wish I hadn't told my non-Christian co-worker that all men liked to be the leaders in relationships, and it took a strong woman to let them.  She didn't say anything, just gave me a funny look.

I wish I hadn't told a good friend who was engaged to be married, that she shouldn't marry the man because he'd been divorced.  We were never good friends again after that.

I wish I hadn't made friends with a girl in college for no other reason than that I wanted to convert her.  I'm glad she never found out.  (She also never converted.)

I wish I hadn't bought into the idea that any music with a rock beat-- even Christian rock-- was of the devil.  I wish I hadn't thrown away my Neil Diamond records, my Simon and Garfunkel , and even my Imperials gospel albums.

I wish I hadn't participated with the rest of the Christian audience at a creation vs. evolution debate, in jeering, booing and hissing the evolutionary scientist, so that he went away knowing Christian audiences had no kindness, no manners and no willingness to listen to points of view other than their own.

I wish I hadn't listened to my pastor when he told me it could damage me spiritually to go see The Return of the Jedi-- so that I didn't find out until years after the final movie appeared in the theatres, how the Star War series ended.

I wish I hadn't given my dad the book Evidence that Demands a Verdict for his birthday, instead of giving him a present he would have really enjoyed.

I wish I hadn't written my Christian friend who came out as gay, a letter that he never forgave me for-- a letter so judgmental and so ignorant of what he was going through, that we never spoke again.

I wish I hadn't rejected a nice shirt my mom gave me as a gift, because the picture on it looked a little "New Age" to me.   I wish I hadn't conveyed my judgment against this shirt and my lack of gratitude to my poor mom so very plainly.

I wish I hadn't treated Christians who went to other churches-- including my own sister!-- as if they just weren't as spiritual or enlightened as we were.

I wish I hadn't been so conscientious in my duties towards younger members of my church that I was supposed to be "discipling"-- but had just let them know that I'd be there for them if they needed anything, and otherwise had just let them live their lives without my oversight or interference.

I wish I hadn't joined the others in my church in shunning those who decided to leave.



So there it is.

I don't think I'm the only one who has regrets like this-- in fact, certain segments of Christianity still strongly encourage their members to act just like I acted.  So I have to ask the question-- if a form of Christianity actually leads people like me to do unloving, inconsiderate, Pharisee-like things that Jesus would not want us to do-- how well is that kind of Christianity actually following its Lord?

Perhaps we all ought to let that be our litmus test.

Thoughts on Legalism

Legalism is often defined by Christians strictly in terms of whether a person is doing “works” to attain salvation or win God’s favor. As Paul said in Galatians 2:21, “I do not frustrate the grace of God, for if righteousness comes by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.” I know of no Christian who would argue that this is legalism.  But many Christians limit it to that.  They say that as long as your reason for following your particular group's rule or practice is not to earn God’s love but rather as a grateful response to His love for you ~ then it’s not legalism.  But after journeying through legalism and coming out the other side, I have come to disagree.

The New Testament teaches that legalism means more than seeking to be justified by works of the law. You can love Christ with all your heart, and you can believe that you are doing everything you do out of love for Jesus, and still be walking in legalism. In fact, a person’s very zeal to go the extra mile for God can make them especially vulnerable to legalistic practice. It’s very easy, when you want to serve God with your whole life, to listen to the myriad of voices in Christianity that say, “If you really love God with all your heart, you will do A, and B, and C. Those who don’t do these things aren’t really on fire for God.”

I know this from personal experience. When I was in college, as I have mentioned earlier, I was in a campus ministry group that became well-known for its coercive religious teachings. Our hearts were right, but many of our practices amounted to what Jesus called “binding heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and laying them on men’s shoulders.” (Matthew 23:5.)

For example, this group forbid all music, television, movies or books that did not meet its high standards of spirituality, based largely upon verses like Psalms 101:3 – “I will set nothing wicked before my eyes.” Many of us went even further and threw our television sets away or burned our books and recordings. But does “I will set nothing wicked before my eyes” actually mean, “throw out your TV”? Or was the Psalmist describing how he expressed his devotion to God, in terms of where he put his focus? In fact, the Bible itself is full of all kinds of things that, if you applied the Psalm as we did, we shouldn’t have been reading about at all! Murders and rapes and warfare and adultery are all things that come “before our eyes” when we read the Scriptures. So is just reading about these things, or watching The Ten Commandments on TV, “setting” wickedness before our eyes?

In fact, my group was going way beyond what the Bible texts actually said, to impose on ourselves all kinds of restrictions and “oughts” and “shoulds” that weren’t really there. And then patting ourselves on the back and looking down on others for not measuring up to our standards.

So what is legalism, if it’s more than just seeking to earn God’s favor through works?

Colossians 2 and Galatians 4 both talk about legalism in terms of bondage to the “rudiments” or “elements” of the world, such as “do not handle, do not taste, do not touch.” All of these sorts of things, Colossians 2:20-22 says, are “ordinances of the world“ which are “to perish with the using.” Verse 23 goes on to say that such things “have indeed a shew of wisdom in will[ful] worship and humility, and neglecting of the body,” but are of no real spiritual use. Galatians 4:9 calls following the “elements” of the world “bondage,” and gives as an example (v. 10) the observance of “days, and months, and times, and years,” as if these observances were what following Christ were all about.

That word translated “rudiments” or “elements” in Colossians 2 and Galatians 4 is the Greek word “stoicheion,” which means “first things from which others. . . take their rise; an element, first principle.” (An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, W.E. Vine, 1966 Ed., p. 22.) When used in conjunction with God‘s word, it refers to the first principles of God’s truth (Hebrews 5:12), but when used in conjunction with “the world,” the word usually means the basics of the physical nature of the earth or of the body. Legalism, then, means living in such a way as to be in bondage to physical, time-bound, earthly principles. These would include rules about eating and drinking, observing special days, and how we treat our bodies (especially, as Col. 2:23 says, neglectful or harsh treatment of our physical bodies as a way to show worship or humility). Jesus even said that marriage was of this physical world (Mark 12:25), and Paul said it’s easier to focus on spiritual things when you‘re not married (1 Cor. 7:7, 32-35) — so being focused on marriage and childbearing, as if these were what Christian living was about, could become bondage to earthly principles as well.

So even if you love Jesus, and consider all your physical, earthly actions as a way to show devotion to Christ, it is possible to still be legalistic. Colossians 2:20 says we should consider ourselves “dead with Christ” to earthly “rudiments,” considering them to be of lesser importance– because we are “complete in Him” according to verse 10. Christ is the “body” or substance of a reality of which earthly things are only a “shadow.” (v. 17), and we are therefore to “let no man judge you” regarding how we handle the rudiments or elements of the world (v. 16). Outward acts of devotion are not wrong; they can even be good– but they can also turn into bondage for us in the way we practice them.

Here are some characteristics of what I have come to recognize as legalistic practice:

1. Making something in the Bible about physical living on this earth, which is not set forth as a commandment, into a commandment. Ways of living that people practiced in the Bible become prescriptive rather than descriptive– we are all supposed to live our lives the same way they did in Bible times, because that’s the “biblical way.” Or we take something the Bible is silent about, and read that as a reason to consider that thing suspect. “The Scriptures speak only of parents training their own children, so sending them to school-- any school-- is at best a poor substitute for homeschooling.”

2. Taking a real or perceived commandment in the Bible to a level of restriction or obligation that goes beyond what the Bible actually gives. The Pharisees had a way of doing this with the law of Moses. The law said, “Don’t work on the Sabbath.” The Pharisees said, “Healing someone is work, and therefore you can’t heal someone on the Sabbath.” The law said, “Don’t eat what is unclean.” The Pharisees said, “You must follow the traditions of ceremonial hand washing in addition to not eating foods that the law calls unclean.” Jesus angered the Pharisees by refusing to follow these over-and-above rules. But some Christians take a verse in the Psalms like “children are a blessing,” and take that to mean that we should never restrict our family size– even when the mother's body is weak and worn out from constant pregnancies.   This comes very close to that neglectful or harsh treatment of our bodies in “bondage” to the “rudiments” that Colossians 2:23 warns against. (Note: 1 Corinthians 9:27, where Paul says, “I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection,” must be balanced with his warning against willed harsh treatment of the body in Colossians 2:23. In 1 Cor. 9, Paul is speaking of keeping himself free of fleshly self-indulgence, and likening this to the physical discipline of training for a race. This passage in no way commands us to ignore our bodies’ warning signs and push them beyond their limits when it is within our ability to protect them.  Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, after all, and we need to take good care of them.)

3. Setting a standard that, though it gives nominal freedom of choice (“this is only what God‘s speaking to me. You don‘t have to do it if God‘s not speaking it to you”), in every practical sense, effectively eliminates that freedom. “The Bible doesn’t actually command you to live like this, but if you really loved God with your whole heart, you would hear Him speak this to you, and you would come to the same convictions I hold.”  I have found that this kind of thinking is at the heart of coercive, spiritually abusive religion-- where religious guilt is used to manipulate and control.

4. Confusing the meaning of a text with the application of a text, and making that application universal. “Application” refers to how the meaning of a passage applies to our own personal lives in the here-and-now. Any one passage of Scripture can lead to a variety of personal applications, and no one application constitutes the meaning of a passage. This is what my religious group was doing with Psalm 101:3, when we treated the text as if it actually meant, “No TV, no non-religious books or music,” to be followed by any Christian who was serious about serving God– when in fact, we were choosing a certain sacrificial lifestyle as a means of applying the meaning of the text, and not very accurately at that!

Legalism is not just thinking you can be justified or earn God’s favor with your works. It’s living in terms of elemental physical principles instead of spiritual freedom. It’s imposing those terms on both yourself and others, in order to (as Galatians 3:2 puts it) “be made perfect by the flesh.” It’s thinking you can become part of God’s extra-special people (“God’s Green Berets,” my religious group used to say) by choosing a "sold-out" lifestyle. There were all kinds of things we did– all kinds of sacrifices we made– not to earn favor or salvation, but to be (and show ourselves off as) more holy.

I know that Jesus said that if we love Him we will keep His commandments. But He also said, “Learn what that meaneth: I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” (Matthew 9:13.) He was talking about living life in terms of what is within instead of what is external– a heart of mercy and love taking precedence over outward acts of “holiness.” What I have come to understand-- the hard way-- is that it's mercy within that God considers the most holy. Outward acts are not wrong– but I've learned to keep them in their proper place and not enter into bondage to them. I've learned not treat them as if they were the substance of Christian life. That means holding mercy in my heart both for myself and for others. 

When we as Christians do that, our “moderation will be known to all” (Phil 4:5), and we will not bind heavy burdens and lay them on anyone’s shoulders to carry.

Not even our own.