Human Sexuality - “A Traditional Christian Vision” with Dr. Tim Tennent
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the hosts, The Weight Podcast, or Oxford University United Methodist Church.
Shownotes:
We can’t have a conversation about sexuality without talking about the human body. Christians have disregarded the body as separate from spirituality, and culture has devalued the body through objectification. All in all, when we talk about a theology of the body, the conversation tends to have a negative spin. In a moment when Christians are known more for what they are against than what they are for, what do traditionalists stand for when it comes to the body and sexuality?
Chris and Eddie are joined by Dr. Tim Tennent, President of Asbury Theological Seminary and author of For the Body: Recovering a Theology of Gender, Sexuality, and the Human Body. Dr. Tennent stands for honoring our bodies’ unique design and purpose. He views the body as not just a biological category, but a theological category as well. He talks to Chris and Eddie about the differences between protestant liberalism and evangelical reductionism regarding same-sex marriage and gender reassignment, his view of the balance between inclusion and transformation within the church, and what the incarnation of Jesus Christ means for Christians.
Series Info:
In March 2020, we started this podcast with the intention of introducing a larger conversation about human sexuality, a central area of division and disagreement in our particular denomination. We’ve decided to come back to that conversation, to explore the church’s relationship to the LGBTQ+ community in light of the various perspectives within the body of Christ. Our context places us at an interesting intersection of the conversation: we’re pastors in a college town, with a lot of progressive folks on a whole range of topics, and we’re pastors in Mississippi, a conservative state, with a lot of folks who think of themselves as conservative on a whole range of topics.
In this series, we hope to honor the weight of a wide range of experiences and perspectives. You will hear from church leaders who have vastly different angles on this cultural moment, on the church’s mission, and how the church should think about biblical authority and interpretation. You will also hear from several people within the LGBTQ+ community, those who are deeply committed to the church and those who have felt like the church’s witness often leaves them feeling on the outside.
We invite you to consider the weight of another person’s concerns, maybe someone with whom you deeply disagree, but to do so in a way that honors their humanity, their story, and their convictions. We make no attempt to be exhaustive or comprehensive. Our aim is not to persuade you on which side to take on this issue. Many of you already know what you believe, and nothing said on this podcast will change your mind. What we want to do is help you better understand both your own views and the views of those you may disagree with.
Resources:
Follow Dr. Tennent on the web:
Purchase For the Body: Recovering a Theology of Gender, Sexuality, and the Human Body here:
https://www.amazon.com/Body-Recovering-Theology-Sexuality-Resources-ebook/dp/B086BT8HT3
Follow Dr. Tennent on Twitter:
Full Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 0:00
I'm Chris McAlilly.
Eddie Rester 0:01
And I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 0:02
Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester 0:04
When we started this podcast back in 2020, it kind of had a specific direction that we had built toward that the pandemic really upended for us very quickly. Our tribe, our denomination, was already beginning to move towards division over the issue of human sexuality. And so we wanted to have people help us with that conversation, to help people maybe understand what they believed or didn't believe in that conversation.
Chris McAlilly 0:34
Yeah, so since then we we did a range of different things. If you've been following the podcast, we've talked about mental health, we've talked about racism, and we talked about food and creation care, and how to raise your children, just a whole range of important, weighty topics. But we wanted to circle back around to this one, because I think the church's relationship with the LGBTQ community is one that it's a central conversation in how the church navigates this particular cultural moment. And we're pastors in a college town and in Mississippi, which means that we pastor and we're in relationship with folks who are very progressive, folks who consider themselves very conservative. And so we wanted to... That's just our perspective.
Eddie Rester 1:17
We encounter folks who fall all over the range of understandings and beliefs around the conversation of human sexuality.
Chris McAlilly 1:25
Yeah, and I'll tell you what I get frustrated by. What I get frustrated by, and we've talked about this in the intro to the podcast, is the tone.
Eddie Rester 1:32
Right.
Chris McAlilly 1:33
And we encounter folks that have very strong convictions, and that's a good thing. It's good to have strong convictions.
Eddie Rester 1:40
However.
Chris McAlilly 1:41
Yeah, and I think what we're shooting for always on the podcast--not just in this conversation, but in every conversation--is how to honor the weight of a person's concern. And we're listening for a particular, not just a conviction, or a position, but a posture, where there's some humility, there's intellectual honesty, and all the rest. I came across an article in this conversation about human sexuality from a guy named Wes Hill, who you'll hear in the series, called "The Tears of Things." And if you want to know about our perspective in the conversation, go read that article.
Eddie Rester 2:15
We make no attempt to be exhaustive or comprehensive in this conversation. That's not what we're trying to do. Our aim is not to persuade you to take one side or the other.
Chris McAlilly 2:25
You already know what you believe.
Eddie Rester 2:25
You already know what you believe, or maybe you're exploring and you need to hear people have conviction on both sides, sharing what they believe. So we're gonna hear from folks, progressive, conservative folks, kind of threading the needle between the two. What we want to do is to help you better understand your own views, and the views of those you may disagree with.
Chris McAlilly 2:49
Yeah, so you're going to hear from some church leaders who have perspectives on biblical authority and biblical interpretation. You're going to hear from gay and lesbian people who disagree, and kind of where they fall in, and how they think about their relationship with the church and with the Bible, and all the rest. And you're gonna maybe, probably, you're gonna feel uncomfortable, and you'll probably be challenged, because I think that this is a challenging conversation.
Eddie Rester 3:19
And to be quite honest, we hope you feel some discomfort, because we felt it. as we've talked to these folks. We haven't tried to push, fight, spin it. We've wanted people to be able to present faithfully where they are. And we hope that you hear that. And if you hear something that you're like, "I disagree with that," go to the next podcast that we'll release or wait for what we're gonna release or go back to the one that we just released. We're hoping to offer you a wide range of conversation on this.
Chris McAlilly 3:50
So we're gonna do a slightly different format here. We're gonna do, over the next three weeks, a Monday and Thursday release. And it'll be almost like a bit of a miniseries. And so we hope that that you enjoy it. It's not exhaustive. So we're gonna leave people out. We're gonna leave perspectives out. We can't do do everything in this series. But we'll come back to this conversation. So if there's somebody else we need to talk to that you you think is important, let us know. Send us an email, you know, send us a direct message on social media. Let us let us know. Comment, share it with folks who you think would would be interested in in this particular way of having the conversation,
Eddie Rester 4:26
We are thankful that you're on the journey and in the conversation with us. So thank you for being with us each and every week.
Chris McAlilly 4:32
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 4:39
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 4:42
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 4:49
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 5:01
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 5:17
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Eddie Rester 5:19
We're here today with Dr. Timothy Tennant who is the president of Asbury seminary. Thank you for spending some time with us today.
Tim Tennent 5:27
Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
Chris McAlilly 5:29
Dr. Tennant, thanks for being here with us. We are excited to talk to you about about this book that you've written "For the Body: Recovering a Theology of Gender, Sexuality, and the Human Body." The book is, you know, there are a number of books that have been written over the last 20 years or so on this topic or kind of in this conversation. You have a particular kind of, you know, angle or kind of perspective on the the larger cultural landscape. I wonder if you would just talk a little bit about why you wrote the book and what you see is being lost and needs to be recovered.
Tim Tennent 6:07
Thank you, it's great to have opportunity to share about it. I do feel like that a lot of the books that are out there, that I have been reading them and see them published last several years, tended to focus on very specific kinds of problematic issues, would be issues about, you know, abortion or adultery or pornography or same sex marriage or whatever. Now, I feel like that, in some ways, this book is looking at the larger landscape. You know, we had the sexual revolution at Woodstock in the 60s. We had the 70s brought us Roe vs. Wade and abortion, and then the rise of adultery in the 80s. And with a computer, digital pornography and violent video games and first person killing and so forth. And obviously, things like assisted suicide, and more recently, in recent decades, same sex marriage and gender reassignment, I think that the church, I think, felt overwhelmed that we really had, like, you know, 15 things we were fighting.
Tim Tennent 7:12
Now I realize that, actually, all of this was about one thing: about the body. They're all about the body, one way or the other. And I felt like that so much of the church's energy had been spent on what we are against, rather than what we are for. You know, what is the positive vision? That's why the book is called "For the Body." It's about laying out the positive vision of what it is that really drives the Christian worldview, and how it responds to all these issues, and probably 10 more that we have yet to even know about. The book really revolves around trying to lay out the positive vision.
Tim Tennent 7:47
I do think we're now at a stage where we have what we call a neo-gnosticism, that is to say, a resurgence of a view that really devalues the body, or least separates it from the human will. And that's a very, very, that's a very important Christian response to give to that. Which of course, as you know, was a big problem in the first century.
Eddie Rester 8:07
One of the, I think it's one of the least talked about, but one of the most significant problems that the church faced in the first century and probably has lingered for the next 19 centuries, as well. For folks who may not be familiar with that kind of gnostic viewpoint, could you flesh that out a little bit for us?
Tim Tennent 8:27
Yeah, gnosticism was an intellectual movement, you might say, spiritual, intellectual movement that began really around the time of Christ and developed quite over next several centuries. So it really coincided with the early cradle birth of the church, which essentially tried to separate the person from the body. And so it was a view that basically viewed that material existence was evil, and the real you was the you inside of you. And so the life journey was to escape the body and discover the you within.
Tim Tennent 9:05
Yeah, all that, of course, sounds very familiar today. So essentially, it's a view that really devalues materialism. And this, of course, is why this is very strong in John's Gospel to respond to it, because John says in his epistles, you know, if you don't believe that Christ came in the flesh, you are the Antichrist. It was extremely strong language, because the idea that we couldn't affirm that Christ had come in the flesh. And John says, you know, "We saw him. We touched him." You know, it was really important that God came to us in enfleshment. And one of my points in the book is that our bodies are meant to point to the incarnation. So the church took as a very serious challenge, and so it's now coming back upon us, and therefore the church has to retool itself to respond to the same devaluing of the human body.
Chris McAlilly 9:55
So when I dive a little bit more deeply into into kind of how you see the cultural moment that we're in, in particularly the North American context, one of the things that I think gets written about a lot, but kind of is in the background of the moral argument that you're making around gender and sexuality and the body, is this move from a moment when a Christian worldview could be assumed to be reinforced by the wider culture into a more kind of post-Christian sensibility or moment where, you know, the church really needs to take on board the fact that it is opposed or contradicted by the wider culture. Could you just talk a little bit more about kind of how you see the culture as a bit, just a bit more hostile than maybe it was in a previous generation or previous centuries?
Tim Tennent 10:54
Yeah, I think that's probably one of the biggest challenges, particularly for mainline churches, which are used to being in the cultural center. And again, very difficult, but in all churches, I think it's a challenge to kind of wake up and realize that we are becoming quite rapidly moving into a post-Christian cultural context, and that affects a number of issues that come through this book. But, you know, I think we're seeing, obviously, especially with gender reassignment question, we're seeing a fracturing of the human will from the body. It's a very, very important dynamic that has been observed by a lot of popular media.
Tim Tennent 11:30
And we actually go back and look at many books written in the last generation predicting this would, could happen, but at that point, it was then, like, in the faculty lounges, you know, it was in kind of like, certain kinds of elite discourse. But today, the fraction of the body has become mainstream. Charles Taylor, the great sociologist, called this moving from a transcendent frame to an eminent frame, you know, we are losing all sense of the transcendent. And therefore, we are in a place where all we're left with is our own story, which is, of course, part of the challenge.
Tim Tennent 12:11
And this has spun this into a much more of a therapeutic view of the self, loss of history, you know, one's real internal self is the real you, very anti-historical bent that comes through all this. There's a lot of indicators that we're definitely crossing into a different kind of cultural moment that hits upon key elements of the gospel, because the gospel involves the incarnation, which is an enfleshed reality, and involves things that happen in history. My PhD is in Hinduism, and Hinduism can roll right on without really any particular impact on history, because Hinduism is about certain kinds of ideas transcendent of history, but in the gospel, God becomes a man in Jesus Christ. And in our Apostles' Creed, he suffered under Pontius Pilate. It directly connects us to historical events.
Tim Tennent 13:05
And so history becomes really, really important. And today we have a collapse of that. And history is viewed with suspicion. And people, the only history that really people can say that they can believe in is their own personal history. That's obviously a real tragedy, because of all these things--incarnation, history--all of that is crucially connected to the Gospel message.
Eddie Rester 13:27
One of the things that I appreciate about your book is that, as you think about all these things, the cultural moment that we're in, you don't start at either, what I say either place of whether conservative or progressives begin. Your starting point, really, is this idea that we are created in the image of God. And why is that so significant for us or for what you want to communicate through the book?
Tim Tennent 13:58
Yes, the book does place a big emphasis on the doctrine of creation, which again, is not a doctrine that necessarily one would think divides any Christians at all. It's a doctrine that should unite all Christians, which is a good point you made. But eventually, essentially, I look at the creation as really bringing us, I think, what I call four interlocking truths that are really, really important. What it means to have a created body and the implications of having a body that was created by God and why he fashioned the body, now argue, in essence, that the body is a pointer, an icon to the future incarnation of Jesus Christ. So God was already anticipating that he would send His Son into the world, and therefore he wanted the body to be an apt vessel for his own revelation. So the body becomes very important for how God revealed himself to the world because I think all Christians believe that, well, we all believe in the Bible. We believe the greatest revelation of God is in Jesus Christ himself. So that's part of the creation.
Tim Tennent 15:05
Also the creation, the second interlocking piece, that I call the related body, and that God actually calls us into relationships, one to another. That's really important, obviously, in marriage, in friendship, and the book deals a lot with the loss of friendships, the devaluing of how marriage understood, and also the lack of the celibate life. But we're all meant to be related in various ways. And that relationship, of course, reflects God's own internal relationships where God was trying to communicate. How do you communicate the internal relationship of the triune, God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit? Well, you create men and women to have relationships. And so we're created with this relational aspect. And it's one of the markers of the image of God.
Tim Tennent 15:52
And I also talk about the sacramental part of the whole thing, that all of the creation is in some way sacramental, in the sense that everything physical points to things that are spiritual in many ways. So the whole earth is, in some ways, a temple of God's presence, and so forth. And so part of I think, you often think about progressives and conservatives disagreeing about, for example, environmental issues. But here's a place where it comes together, where we actually believe that we should all agree that the creation does have a sacramental pointer to it. It's important.
Tim Tennent 16:25
And then finally, I talked about the disciple body that we are meant to be tutored and to be trained into this, that we don't just naturally understand the things of God and that even the church, even if you're a Christian, part of the Wesleyan vision, Wesleyan disciple means to be brought into the mysteries of the faith. And we have to recapture that as the church. And so I think in some ways, the creation really is the foundation upon which the whole book is built.
Chris McAlilly 16:52
Right. Yeah, I, in some ways, I feel like, you know, one of the things that, just in trying to think about how the book is situated in the conversation, I feel like you're trying to... I guess I read you in part as trying to chart a path between Protestant liberalism, and a kind of what you call evangelical reductionism. The Protestant liberalism, it would be a tradition that would tend to frame the conversation about human sexuality in terms of justice, a broader kind of range of justice issues. And you actually have a, you know, really nice kind of summary of that approach at the beginning of the book, where you would think of same sex marriage as not a moral issue as much as a matter of justice and equality and the struggle for human dignity and equality. That's that's not the approach that you want to take. You want to frame the conversation in a moral frame. But I wonder, I feel like you also are aware of some of the dangers on the evangelical reductionistic side of the conversation. I wonder if you could just talk a bit about kind of the problems that you see on kind of either side of the argument that you're trying to put forward?
Tim Tennent 18:11
Yeah, on the on the progressive side, I think there's been a profound departure from seeing the scriptures as actual revelation from God. It gives us normative insight into how to live. And so I think there's been obviously a mistake to render I mean, there are justice issues connected to this. So let me just be fair, there are examples where we should be very strong on not allowing and not condoning any kind of violence, or any kind of disassociating with people in our society based on decisions they make, even if we disagree with those, because we are people in community and we are called to respect the dignity of people and the image of God. So in that sense, I did think that you can't divorce this from some issues of justice in certain situations.
Tim Tennent 19:02
But the thing that bothers me on that side is that we seem to, on the Protestant liberal side, they've been unable to understand the needs of the church on one hand, to be extremely open and embracing of whoever walks through the door of a church. That's part of the radical, universal call of God, to come. And we want to receive people with the joy of the Lord. But we also believe as strongly in the power of transformation and holiness that God does call us to distinctive life for him that reflects his glory. And so that would be both my appreciation and my critique on the progressive side.
Tim Tennent 19:42
But on the evangelical side, I think the challenge there has been too, as you said, reductionistic, that's to say to view these issues, as separate atomistic issues. You know, it's saying, we're against pornography. We're against doctor-assisted suicide. We're against changing genders. We're against whatever. And so it becomes kind of a negative vision. And I think my experience for the wider culture is that they actually know that we're against these things. We don't need to tell them. They know we're against it. In fact, I've often said that if you tell someone you're against something five times, without telling them what for, you become annoying.
Tim Tennent 20:22
So I think in some ways, we have to get out of that mode and say, Well, what are we for? And I think the evangelicals have not been as strong in bringing these issues together, and seeing how it really is about a theology of the body and not simply approach these issues atomistically or separately. And that way we can get into more of a positive frame. So I think that sense evanglicals have a lot of growth to do. I think we've gone through one generation of just kind of rehearsing things we're against, but we now are at new juncture. We have to be much more articulate about what is the Christian view.
Tim Tennent 21:01
Why would the church be against same sex marriage? Why would we be against someone changing their gender? What is the difference between saying, "I was born that way," and "God made me that way," which is a very important distinction that is lost in the Christian discourse. So I think all of this needs to be recaptured and recovered, if we're going to make any really substantial progress. I don't think this is a short-term challenge. I'd say this is a generational challenge. So I think it's gonna take us probably, you know, 40 years to get on the right side of this conversation. It may not happen in my lifetime. I do believe we can at least start to think well, and think better to try to capture some on the larger themes that are before us today.
Eddie Rester 21:46
And when you talk about that, I hear your background in mission in missiology. That really is at the heart of your earlier, you know, really the heart of your work and your studies. And I that's what I hear is this drumbeat of "Okay, how does the church approach mission in this moment?" And I think that's one of the pieces that on either end gets lost sometimes in the argument.
Chris McAlilly 22:14
Yeah. And I feel like another way that I view your work here is trying to kind of set the terms upon which the mission field could be played. And I think it's interesting that you find resources in the Catholic direction. You know, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. So you, I know that you've preached a series of sermons that were kind of based on some homilies that were offered by the late Pope John Paul II. Could you, for folks who are not familiar with his theology, the body and kind of that dimension of of his work, could you kind of give folks that thumbnail sketch?
Tim Tennent 22:54
Yeah, well, let me just first by saying that most of my writings have been in mission areas. This book seemed for many to be outside my normal things I write about. But I do think this is crucial to mission North America and in the Western world in general. And so I did see it as part of mission is getting inside people's heads and asking what questions they have. And so I do think this is consistent in some ways with my interest in how we reach people for Christ.
Tim Tennent 23:24
But I did come across John Paul II's work probably seven years ago. I wasn't really aware, I don't think, that he had actually done these homilies. And so he had started these homilies in the late 70s, throughout the 80s, where he did a weekly homily on a theology of the body. He just let it and set it forth in like 15, 20 minute homilies for years. The only break he took on that project was when he had that assassination attempt, and he had several months off. But other than that, he was very consistent. I was on a Wednesday, every Wednesday, it was the day that he went. And he gave this homily. And so someone eventually clicked these together and translated them into English. And they were published. And that's when I first began to encounter this.
Tim Tennent 24:17
Now, since that time, there's a man named Christopher West, a wonderful Roman Catholic man, who has been kind of given the charge. He has a theology by the Institute in Pennsylvania. And his goal is to communicate theology of the body to the larger Protestant world. So what he did was he went around, and he's written several books about the theology of body and he has his own books about it, which have been trying to help simplify because in some parts of the book of John Paul II, it can be very dense for some people to wade through. It's a very big, thick book. And so it's been popularized by Christopher West. So we've had him here at Asbury, for example, to speak, very good speaker.
Tim Tennent 25:00
So I really think the Roman Catholics have led the way on this. And one of my jokes about that, if I can be afforded a joke here on the podcast, I say, "How do you compare the evangelicals and Roman Catholics when they face a cultural issue?" I said--this is just a joke. I said, "Well, the Pope calls in the Jesuits and says to them, in very sonorous tone, says that we have a problem. Would you go study the problem and report back in 10 years. Evangelicals will be writing their response on the back of an envelope on their way to a mass rally." That kind of was, obviously, caricature, but I do think that the Jesuits, traditional Catholicism has spent a lot of time looking at cultural issues and asking, "what is the bigger point at play here?" which is a great, great gift to us. So I do think Roman Catholics deserve credit. My book of course casts all of this in more Wesleyan terminology, etc. But I do think that they are to be commended for pointing out early on, this is about the body. I think I first realized that in reading Roman Catholic writers, and I want to give them credit for that.
Eddie Rester 26:13
We've danced around a little bit, but what are the implications if we start with this theology of body? What are the implications for us and how we do mission, how we speak and act? Where does a theology of the body take us that's different than maybe, where progressives or our evangelicals may land normally?
Tim Tennent 26:41
I guess the most basic summary of that in a nutshell is that we don't believe the body is merely a biological category. That's the big problem, the progressive's whole approach, the body is not married, it's not less than that. It's not, you know, it is a biological category. It's also a theological category is the basic point of the whole book in some ways. And so what we argue in the book that, in fact, you know, we are created in the image of God. Our bodies are icons of spiritual reality, that that transforms everything about how we interact with other people. So when I'm meeting another person, I'm meeting someone not only who's in the image of God, but who is an icon of the incarnation of God.
Tim Tennent 27:27
When I get married, you know, my wife and I are not just simply two biological units getting married, who may or may not choose to have children, etc. But we're actually icons of Christ in the church. We point to that great mystery of Christ in the church. Childbearing is itself an icon of the Trinity. This is the themes of the book, you know. And I also have a whole chapter dedicated to the celibate life, because one of the things that comes out in early Christian teaching from Augustine onward, and I think, New Testament of course, is that there are actually two meanings of the body. One meaning is, of course, that the body, the wonderful way that body represents the incarnation, etc. It's all true for all bodies, but also the celibate body. The celibate life is also one of the great pointers to the new creation, because, well, we'll know marriage in heaven. We'll be married to Christ. And there are some people who, in this life, are already married to Christ.
Tim Tennent 28:28
And I argue in the book that we should not use the term, for example, a single person, because the Bible never calls the unmarried person a single person. It calls them single focused perhaps, or single minded, but never single because they're actually already prefiguring the incarnation, the new creation. So the book really tries to look at, you know, our bodies are married state or are being celibate and single, or having children, all of these things that are the kind of normal stuff of life that people experience are, in fact, pointers to spiritual realities, not just biological units, but spiritual realities, and that does transform how you walk through the world.
Tim Tennent 29:17
And, in fact, the book actually, eventually develops what I call our sacramental presence in the world, which gets into not simply what the meaning of baptism and the Eucharist but also I have a whole chapter on the ordinary things of life that we do, you know, in life. I call this kind of daily sacraments, daily liturgies of life, you know, where you get up and you get dressed and you make up your bed and you prepare meals and you wash clothes and you play and you clean out the gutters and you mow the grass and take out the trash. All these things are things that everybody does or you have to pay someone else to do them. I mean, everybody has to get these jobs done. And so I try to call people into that sacredness of life and what it means to walk through ordinary life has quotidian mysteries that ordinary life mysteries where we learn to walk sacramentally in the world. So I actually believe this book is trying to envision how our entire bodies are transformed, and how we connect to everybody else. It's a lot more than about issues of sex or gender. It's about the whole nature of life itself.
Chris McAlilly 30:25
I want to come back to the questions of sex and gender, but I do wonder if you could just try to flesh out this larger vision of the body in a theological reading of the human body. And you think about those implications for different dimensions of the kind of modern cultural moment. One of those is, you know, I wanted to press into a bit, it's just the way your view of how women and particularly women's bodies are treated in American culture in a particularly kind of a sexualized manner on social media. And otherwise, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about that, and the implications of your theological vision for the way that we think about kind of engaging the culture today?
Tim Tennent 31:18
Yeah, thank you. The book is mostly dedicated to the positive vision. But I do have two chapters that are connected to some of what I call the objectified body and the ways that the body is objectified in the culture. And ironically, in the cultural conversation, we don't really hear a lot of talk about the way by our bodies are portrayed in art and media. And so I do lay out some of the destructive forces in that. I mentioned, for example, some you know, TV commercials and Superbowl commercials, where you pay millions of dollars to models to connect their bodies with hamburgers, like Carl Jr's hamburger, or particular cars and things like that. And that's not about pornography. Pornography, of course, is much deeper and more destructive. But in fact, it's all over society and billboards, and all kinds of ways in which advertisements happen.
Tim Tennent 32:16
So I expose some of the research was done about even very young children are asked you know, about their bodies, and even very young children will say things like, they wish they were thinner, or wish they were, they didn't see themselves as beautiful because they are in a grocery line with their mother, and they see a front cover of Cosmopolitan or Glamour magazine, or whatever. And so we're trying to unfold some of the destructive elements of how the body is portrayed in society. And I basically unlock in the book.
Tim Tennent 32:24
And, of course, this is, it happens different ways, different in men and women. But generally speaking, a lot of it plays out in women in terms of shame, and they have shame of their bodies, etc. And it's a lot of shaming that goes on in terms of how people dress or not, and so forth, how they look. And then with men, it's often used to incite lust. And so the book openly talks about some of the challenges this has made in the society, because I actually call this, I contrast it to the incarnation, where Christ is the incarnation where you have a full union of spirituality with the human body. And the forces of the modern period are trying to dis-incarnate. So you, for example, you separate a woman's personhood from their body when you portray their body on a billboard, or in a magazine glossy cover where you're portraying their body, and obviously in pornography. But it's all over our society. And it's a form of dis-incarnation.
Tim Tennent 33:49
And so I try to highlight that, because in all the conversation culturally, there really hasn't been a big cultural conversation on how bodies are portrayed in public media, in art, videos, commercials, television, etc. And that's something I think we need to have a better conversation about, and certainly parents, with their children, when they're seeing these things, you know, all over the media.
Eddie Rester 34:16
As you talk about that, I think that really goes into what you were talking about earlier, and just a lot of the shifts that have happened in the last 60 years in American culture. The shift, as Charles Taylor puts it, from a transcendent frame to an imminent frame. That a lot of these conversations got disconnected, that the church once assumed that everybody thought like us, but the culture really thinks differently than us. And that's been a hard... That's been a hard shift, I think for the church and for pastors to really reconsider, "okay, the world doesn't think like us. The world is not going to do our job of training our children or converts to the faith." And it causes us to do what you're talking about here, which is, okay, let's have a deeper level conversation about these things. And I feel like that's part of where you're driving us is to realize we've got to have these conversations. The world around us is not going to have these conversations. Would you say that's part of what's underlying all this? Or am I just drifting off somewhere in the thing?
Tim Tennent 35:31
No, it's a great point. And I think you go back to books like Philip Wright's book, "The Triumph of the Therapeutic," Robert Bellah's book "Habits of the Heart." You mentioned already the book by Taylor, "The Sources of the Modern Self." Those books predicted that we might actually end in this place. And here we are in this place. And so they actually call it, their term for it is "expressive individualism." So you're right, we're in a point where it's not simply just kind of generic American individualism, which we've had that. I think our whole history has all been more or less individualistic. But this is a new kind of individualism, which is much more virulent, and much more separate in terms of society, in terms of how we understand our bodies, and our wills, etc.
Tim Tennent 36:23
So, yeah, we are in this situation. And I think that the church has to at least be encouraged about major challenges. In the first century, you know, we were a caricature. They thought that our Eucharist was a form of cannibalism. We were, you know, in every way, we were regarded as blatant misfits on the margins of society. And yet, the church prevailed by being persistently loving people into the kingdom to the power of the gospel. And so I think we have to regain our confidence in the Gospel. That's our biggest challenge--is not the world but our own selves, and reclaiming the confidence what it means to be a Christian and to understand the Christian message.
Tim Tennent 37:05
And I think there's a kind of an apologetic, where we basically say, and this is particularly true in the evangelical world, you know, we ask the question, what is the least one has to do to become a Christian? Well, that is the absolute last question which we should be asking. We should be saying, what is the most we can be as the followers of Christ? What does it mean to be transformed? And we should be boldly calling people into the transformed life because, as Wesley said, a happy man is a holy man. And so we don't really believe that we really calibrated well to confidently facing this culture and realize this culture does not have answers.
Tim Tennent 37:46
And I think in some ways, the more recent couple of years with all the really serious division, I notice, if you flip around to all the channels of media, across the spectrum theologically, you actually do get a common theme that people realize we are not in a cultural heyday, not in a cultural... We're not in some kind of like, you know, Golden Age. People realize that something's wrong. They just don't know what it is or how to respond to it. And so I do think we are in a cultural moment where on the one hand, things are extremely challenging, but other hand, the world has no answers. And if a church has the courage and the inner fortitude, and then transform lives to embody it, I believe we will see a tremendous turning to the Gospel in the generation to come.
Chris McAlilly 38:35
So towards the end of the book, you kind of work your way towards three fundamental problems and the way that you you view the challenges that this particular cultural moment poses to the church and some of the the ways in which you see answers to those questions. And two of those I expected, and the third one, I think, is the one I want to talk about. The two that I expected were, you know, this turn towards biblical authority and the need to view scripture as revelatory, particularly, not just as it pertains to theological concepts, but ethical and moral dimensions of our life. And the other one that you mentioned is just the loss of moral argument. And this is, you know, one of the things I really appreciate about your book is that you're framing up, you know, a serious, confident, Christian vision that's connected to the deepest veins of the Gospel and scripture and Christian theological traditions.
Chris McAlilly 39:33
I think the one that I find most interesting is one I kind of turn to, is irreparable harm and hate speech because I think this gets in the direction of the implications of your vision for pastoral ministry, for the way in which Christians intersect with the LGBT community, and also where I hear among friends who are gay or lesbian some of the most confusion or even pain as they think about how the church desires to be in ministry with them. So on the one hand, there's kind of this call that you make, that Christians need to absolutely be one of the first in line to condemn something like the Pulse shootings in 2016. On the other hand, it seems like you're a bit worried about Christians who experience same sex attraction and describing themselves as gay Christians. And I wonder if you could just kind of flesh out maybe some of the implications for pastors out there that might be struggling, for Christians, as well, and then also maybe members of the LGBT community who may be listening in, and just trying to kind of get a handle on how you're thinking of their place as it relates to the life of the church?
Tim Tennent 40:51
Well, yes, as I said, earlier, I think that the church should have a radical inclusion in terms of welcoming everyone into their midst, but also embrace the importance of transformation. I think the the challenge in terms of how we approach transformation and how people live their lives, I do think that the church has sometimes lost language of transformation, lost the language of how we believe what it means to be a member of the church. And so part of the Christian messaging and New Testament, of course, is the most dominant way that we are referred to in the New Testament as those who are "in Christ." So therefore, our identity in Christ becomes the prior, it becomes the central identity of the Christian, we are in Christ.
Tim Tennent 41:45
So I don't actually mean to single out LGBT people in terms of adjectival qualifiers. Actually, it's true for anybody. I don't think it's right to say, you know, you are an American Christian, as opposed to being a Christian. You know, we are Christians. We're not just American Christians. We're Christians. Now you may be a Christian that's American. You may be a Christian that suffers with same sex attraction, whatever. Those are all things that we... You know, people that are alcoholics, whatever. But we don't start out as the lead statement, "we are a gay Christian" example. That, to me, doesn't makes sense, because it actually puts an adjectival qualifier as the main identity point. And that can never be true of a Christian. Our identity is in Jesus Christ. And so we should always...
Tim Tennent 42:32
So for example, if you had a gathering of people. What is the base of a gathering of let's say, same-sex attracted people. I think the gathering should not be around being same-sex attracted, which was in my mind is a disorder. And people are calling you out of that. And again, someone who is in a situation where they feel, and they cannot, they're not at this point, at least, not out of that, then of course, they're called to a celibate life. And so I know a lot of people who are SSA, who have recovered the power of same-gender friendships, and have shown us the way of that, and also the celibate life.
Tim Tennent 43:18
So the unifying point is the positive vision, which is to celebrate life. And so I do think that there's ways we can reframe these things around the Christian vision. And we will never want something that involves part of our, you know, part of our brokenness to be the lead point of our identity. This then makes sense to me. So I do have that concern in the book. And I try to keep people on focused on the positive Christian vision, even as we walk with people who have ongoing brokenness. We all do in various ways. It's not saying that this is something you can just pray away, in a simple way. But the point is, there's people who will have long struggles, but we simply don't want to make that their identity and as the way they identify themselves.
Chris McAlilly 44:05
Right, yeah. And thank you for just clarifying. You know, I think my concern in this is, you know, I see some of the ways in which the conversation among the kind of PCA or kind of the way the conversation has unfolded in the Presbyterian Church, or the Anglican Church of North America. This is a sticking point, particularly among folks who are trying to find their way into the life of the church. Particularly I'm thinking about folks like Wesley Hill, who you acknowledge and finds his way into the conversation about spiritual friendship in your book. I see folks like Wes Hill, kind of, you know, thinking through some of these issues as well. And for those who don't know Wes Hill, he's a celibate gay New Testament scholar who is ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church USA.
Chris McAlilly 45:05
And, you know, I think what somebody like Wes would say would be that there's a unique careism that comes from his particular struggle to be faithful to the gospel and to kind of identify himself as a gay Christian says something about about his experience, and in the way that would be more comparable to someone who would describe themselves as part of the Black Christian community, or whatever else. I do take your point. I think that Wes would, too, that at the end of the day, any adjective that you would put before Christian or you know, our identity, fundamentally being in Christ is the most important dimension. But I think that this is just an area, I think, that reminds us of how difficult the conversation is, and really how challenging, I think, it is to speak well, not only from a position that's faithful, but also with a posture that is charitable.
Tim Tennent 46:14
Yeah, that's a great point, I think that probably the best example of this very tension you bring out is in the Revoice Conference, I'm sure you're aware of, which brings people together that have this conversation. So these are not outsiders, you know, talking about people. That's why I think it's important. These are people that are in this struggle, who themselves are talking about their experience. And as you may know, they essentially are divided between what they call Side A and Side B. And the Side A would be people who do want to reconcile their Christian faith with their experience, and say, in some way, that they could be a gay Christian and that becomes a positive statement of their identity as a gay person. And the Side B, which is a more traditional Christian view, it says, no, we understand our struggles, but we are trying to be faithful in celibacy and therefore we are not going to accept this. This is a disorder, in other words, that we must live with before God and work our way through that.
Tim Tennent 47:18
So that dynamic is there in their own conversation with themselves and how they respond to this issue. And that's what I think we're gonna have to see how that works itself out over time. But you're right, this is definitely a very important conversation, because it's all about the particularity and universality and what way are we universally united as the people of God? And what way do we describe ourselves in particularistic ways? You mentioned Black Christian. The difference between, in my mind, between ontological identity, where you're talking about something that is who you are in terms of race, for example, or you're a Malayali speaking Christian or Spanish speaking Christian, as opposed to something that is part of the disorder. And that's why I think the distinction between "God made me that way" and "I was born that way" is different. Because I think the Biblical view is that we can be born with all kinds of disorders.
Tim Tennent 48:16
As Augustine said, there were the four marks in the fall, and one of them is concupiscence, which is the orientation and sexual perversions of various kinds. And it's not just same sex, all kinds of things that happen, pederasty and other things, as opposed to, you know, what it means to be and identify with Christ in ways that are ontologically just how we created. And our creation is Black or white or Hispanic, whatever. So those are just distinctions that are being made, because we say, "we're born that way." That's not the same as saying, "God made me that way." God made us in His image. And God did not make us in ways that are disordered. It's the fall. We're born in sin that has actually created disorders. And we need to make that distinction in my mind and talk and have this conversation.
Eddie Rester 49:08
Dr. Tennent, I want to thank you for your time today. And thank you for contributing your book. For folks who want to pick a copy of that up, it's "For the Body." It's been out since late 2020. So really just appreciate your willingness to share with us, but also to write what I think is a book that really helps pull a lot of threads together for the church.
Tim Tennent 49:32
Thank you very much. And I hope this book is just the first of many. A lot of great things need to be written and I encourage everyone to get involved in this conversation. I think we all grow better through it. So thank you very much.
Chris McAlilly 49:43
Thanks so much.
Eddie Rester 49:46
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 49:49
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Eddie Rester 50:00
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]