Let’s Get Real – Its about Culture

Christianity is not a culture. The Body of Christ is always and only inculturated if it is truly a manifestation of God incarnate in Jesus. Only if we understand this can we begin to develop intelligent forms of Christian discourse built on the recognition that our differences are primarily cultural, not theological. Our debates about sex, sexuality, and gender are a good example. 

Because sex, sexuality, and gender do not arise from biological processes or theological reflection. They are created by culture.

It is in the realm of sex, the distinction between male and female, that it seems most obvious that the issue is either biological or theological. As my university biology professor said, and he could never say it today without losing his job, the way you tell the difference between a man and a woman is by pulling down their genes. Ha ha. If only it was 1974 again and it was all just a matter of X’s and Y’s.  We now know that there is a lot more to biological sex than genitals and chromosomes. A dizzying array of genes contribute to the supposedly distinctive characteristics related to the words “male” and “female” and they are distributed rather than siloed across the human population. It is individual cultures that decide what to do with the resulting physiological ambiguity by labeling some people “masculine” and some “feminine.” 

But what about theology? Aren’t the scriptures straightforward? “Male and female he created them.” Well, that sentence is straightforward if you also think that a woman was pulled out of the side of the original Adam. Or that the first human was created by God who made a little doll out of dirt and breathed Spirit into it. So yes, if you reject everything we know about the formation of the earth and the evolution of life on earth and all of genetics then it is theologically straightforward. As straightforward as believing that the earth is 6000 years old and flat. Otherwise these simple statements in the Bible are going to require some interpretation. And then they aren’t simple anymore, because now their meaning can emerge only by understanding their cultural background.

If sex can’t really be defined by simple biology or reference to scripture then sexuality is certainly more complex. Now we’re talking about how individuals understand themselves in relationship to other individuals as sexual beings. But what does the term sexual even mean in this context?

I worked for many years in a cultural context in which a man holding a woman’s hand was regarded as an intimate form of sexual connection. So much so that it wouldn’t be appropriate in public, and if seen in public might lead straight to the altar. Yet in the same culture it was perfectly appropriate, with supposedly no sexual implications, for men to hold hands with men and women to hold hands with women in public. 

On the other hand in that same culture mere physical union for the purpose of producing children wasn’t necessarily considered intimate, or even sexual in the contemporary Western sense, at all.  It was something a man had to do and a woman had to bear in order to produce children. 

So how do we identify the sexuality of a man or woman? It is perfectly possible in the cultures I mentioned above to have a man for whom orgasm is related to sex with a woman (which he desires because he wants to have his own children) but for whom true sexual intimacy involves holding hands with another man. 

If physical relations aren’t helpful with regard to understanding sexuality then scripture is even less so. The very concept of sexuality is modern and therefore is not taken up in any direct way in scripture. The Old Testament gives us examples of passionate,  even intimate relations between men and men, between women and women, and between women and men. But there is no hint of something like a modern concept of sexuality. 

In the New Testament we do have Romans 1, but it’s hard to imagine that the Pauline narrative of sin in the world represents normative teaching about contemporary concepts of human sexuality. Paul is communicating the essential truths of the gospel out of one form of cultural/religious understanding of human reality into a very different cultural/religious setting. How do you distinguish between the gospel and the cultural framework and language within which it must be articulated?  If these matters couldn’t be contested within the framework of modern evangelical New Testament scholarship they would not be so contentious in that exact framework. 

And what about gender? The normal meaning of this word is the social roles assigned to males and females. Here, biology tells us almost nothing. Yes, there are differences in the physical make up, on the average, between men and women. And that makes each suited, on the average, for certain roles more than others. But this is all on the average. I personally know many women who are bigger than me and physically stronger than me and therefore far more suited than I am to take on roles traditionally assigned in American society to men. And I know men who are temperamentally and even physically far more suited to be nurturing and caring for small children or the elderly, roles traditionally assigned to women in American society. And it only takes a moment searching across other cultures to see far different gender expectations than are found in American culture. In an era of surrogacy associating child bearing (a biological function) with motherhood is nonsensical. But Solomon understood that, as did the Pharaoh’s daughter.

Reading gender, or sexually related social roles, out of scripture is also problematic. For one thing much of Jesus’ teaching focuses on the great reversal of all social roles that comes about with the reign of God. Secondly Paul’s primary concern, as mentioned above, is witness in the larger culture. So as it is with sexuality, so with gender. We don’t know if he is affirming social roles as understood by Greco-Roman culture or simply accepting them so that Christians can effectively witness to Jesus Christ in that cultural context. In any case, if Paul is actually affirming the gender roles of his cultural world as normative in God’s order (as some argue he does in his letter to Timothy) then we would also have to accept that master/slave relationships are God-ordained. 

But see, already the word culture comes into the discussion. 

The reality is that men do not come from Mars and women do not come from Venus. Neither do they come out of the Bible or science. Male and female, gay, lesbian, queer, twin-spirited, trans, bi, man, woman: All these concepts arise out of specific cultural framings of human nature and human relations. So every discussion of them is actually a discussion about cultural framings of reality and the perpetuation or overthrowing of those cultural norms that arise from these framings.

Thus  the only fruitful approach to conflicts over these matters is to engage in inter-cultural dialogue using the readily available tools of cultural intelligence, or CQ.

It is the abject failure of Christian leaders across the theological and ideological spectrum to foster inter-cultural dialogue or cultivate cultural intelligence that has resulted in our current United Methodist catastrophe. To be specific, United Methodist leaders of all sorts have assumed a false universality around the Discipline and its theological and social principles.

The current UM Discipline is a cultural artifact of mid-20th century American culture, lightly modified over the decades under dominantly US leadership. The emerging GMC Discipline is likewise such a US cultural artifact, although coming from a different culture within the US. Neither, absent explicit recognition of cultural differences at the deepest level, has any possibility of unifying a global church. Because unity around a single culture is impossible, and in any case:

Christianity isn’t a culture. Christianity is a multi-faceted product of culture and cultural interactions whose unity is found only in Christ. If we continue to ignore this reality, fail to account for it in our theology, and propagate false narratives of self-justification then our already long slide into obscurity and irrelevance is both certain and deserved. 

There is an alternative: give up ill conceived and ultimately deceptive efforts to create a universal Christian culture or worse, a supposedly universal Christian tradition, and instead look to Christ alone for both continuity and unity. Then we must acknowledge that out of the great diversity of cultures in which God has chosen to be incarnate through the Body of Christ, there emerges a diversity of understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender. It is not and never will be easy for those in these different cultures, with their different understandings and articulations of faithful belief and practice, to live and work together. But it can be done when we get real about culture.