I found this video on Facebook the other day, and it's a concise account of the biblical scholar Dan McClellan's take on New Testament sexual ethics. Because it's short and captioned, I transcribed it.
This is just a brief reminder that the sexual ethic of the Apostle Paul has no relevance to today and Christians already reject the majority of it anyway. There are really only a couple of main points that are still preserved: abstinence before marriage and condemnation of same-sex intercourse. And those are preserved not because "this is god's will" or because the Bible says so. They're preserved because they have become convenient identity markers, and because they have become useful in the structuring of power and values in favor of the identity politics and the boundary maintenance of the relevant groups.
But everything else that Paul said is dismissed as just not for us anymore. Paul was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate, and you should only get married if you could not hack celibacy your sex should not be passionate because the passion of desire was for the dirty dirty gentiles who did not know God. Christian sex was to be holy and to be honorable, and the point was prophylaxis. Paul - because of Greek philosophical frameworks - thought of desire as a problematic product of our base material existence that we had to overcome, and so you had to keep a tight lid on sexual desire, and sex within marriage should only happen enough to screw down that lid tighter, so it was to be passionless and prophylactic and rare.
So it was not about procreation for Paul. He couldn't have cared less, he thought Jesus was coming back too soon for that to matter anyway. So Paul's motivations for these things are based on social historical ideological philosophical frameworks and circumstances that simply don't exist anymore. And so the majority of it has rightly been dismissed by Christians who recognize that it does not serve us anymore.
What we hold on to, we hold on to for rhetorical purposes because it serves our structuring of power and values, and there will also come a time when those things are rejected as not for us anymore. It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of when enough of us will decide that the utility to our boundary maintenance and our structuring of power and values is not worth the damage it does to the lives, to the mental health, to the well being of the people who are put in the crosshairs by the deployment of those things as identity markers.
This is wonderfully incoherent, though I agree with some of what McClellan says, such as that most of today's Christians reject Paul's teachings on sexuality, though it's less deliberate dismissal than blithe ignorance of what they find inconvenient - a process that isn't limited to New Testament teachings on sexuality. Liberal Christians especially ignore the end-times teachings that permeate the New Testament, for example, displacing them onto the book of Revelation.
First, Paul's sexual ethic is also Jesus'. Jesus also regarded abstinence as preferable, while recognizing that not everyone could attain his standard. Matthew 19:12 is the most explicit example, though warnings that even feeling desire merited damnation appear elsewhere in the gospels. Displacing the anti-sexual teaching onto Paul is a popular apologetic move.
Second, their ethic didn't work for most people in their own day, not even for most Christians. But then Jesus taught that most people would be damned, so it didn't matter. Probably their teachings work, or are relevant, for the same proportion of people today. As McClellan says, a similar hostility to the passions was taught by some "Greek philosophical frameworks" of Paul's and Jesus' day; it seems to have been in the air. It can be found in Hinduism and Buddhism too, and some historians think that Buddhism may have influenced Greek philosophy. But those frameworks weren't embraced by most people then, any more than they are now.
McClellan says that Paul (and I would add Jesus) "was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate." Of course. We can see today that people tend to overgeneralize from their own experiences and hangups. But "dogmatically"? I don't think Paul would have been attracted by anti-sexual philosophy if he weren't already temperamentally in tune with it. The dogma followed from his own inclinations rather than vice versa, just as people today latch onto biblical or other teachings they agree with, ignoring their context.
Best of all, McClellan acknowledges that Paul condemned "same-sex intercourse," which is not a biblical concept, but implies that Paul (along with other biblical writers) would have condemned "homosexuality," which is a subset of "same-sex intercourse," not a discrete or separate thing. In other videos McClellan has claimed that the ancients (lumping together numerous cultures over a long period of time) didn't have "our concept of homosexuality" (lumping together numerous concepts within, presumably, the "modern West" or academic theorists).
Apologists almost always do this, I've found (I've followed the debates for about 50 years): first they deny that the Bible has anything to say about "homosexuality," then they flip and say that it condemns "homosexuality." In the same way, orthodox Foucauldians will say that "homosexuality" didn't exist before the word was coined in the 1860s, then describe laws or attitudes that penalized homosexuality long before the 1860s, or use the word about cultures that have supposedly have no concept of homosexuality. Before McClellan mocks antigay dogmatists for their incoherence and inaccuracy, he should consider the beam in his own eye.
McClellan is misusing "identity politics" again. Has he read the Combahee River Collective Statement yet? The way he uses it is what he calls a "credence," a shibboleth to show that one belongs to a given group: biblical scholars, say, or hard-nosed anti-dogmatists. It seems to be bad when others use credences, but not when he uses them.
There's an old witticism that if you marry the spirit of the age you will soon be a widow/er. McClellan is aware of this, but he seems to think that he's exempt from it. He seems to believe in progress. The bad old dogmas will be abandoned, he says, because they don't serve us anymore. But who's "us" here? The values he rejects, he says reflect "our structuring of power and values," our "boundary maintenance." What will replace them? Won't their replacements also be about structuring power and values? I don't ask this, obviously, because I want to retain Jesus' and Paul's sexual ethics; it's because I've observed that power is served by the culture of therapy whose values are served by elite professionals with their own dogmas, credences, and desires to control others. All moral systems, including McClellan's whatever it is, including mine, are historically / culturally / ideologically influenced, no matter how sure their proponents are that they have risen above such constraints. And the more sure they are that they are uniquely qualified to protect and help those who've been wounded by the bad old dogmas, the more wrong they usually are.
