Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline

Sexing the Pauline Body of Christ: Scriptural Sex in the Context of the American Christian Culture War

 Sexing the Pauline Body of Christ: Scriptural Sex in the Context of the American Christian Culture War D I A N A M . S WA N C U T T Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age . . . [It] is probably the issue in our time which could be our salvation if we thought it through. —luce irigaray, Ethics 5 If there are no hard and fast sex types, there can be no apartheid of sex. —martine rothblatt In the midst of war in Iraq and a color-coded campaign against terror, American Christians are waging an intense cultural battle over the sexual dynamics of sexual difference. Responding to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts (2004) and civil union in Vermont (2000) and Connecticut (2005), some of the nation’s largest Protestant denominations (e.g., the Southern Baptist Convention), evangelical political organizations (e.g., the Arlington Group, Focus on the Family, and the American Family Association), and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have devoted unparalleled resources to fighting similar threats to American moral values in other states. In 2003 the Christian Right likewise pressed President Bush to back a constitutional amendment defining marriage as ‘‘between one man and one woman.’’ In December of 2004, CBS even rejected an ad that welcomed gays in the United Church of Christ because it ‘‘touches on the exclusion of gay couples . . . by other individuals and organizations . . . and the Executive Branch has recently proposed a 66 兩 t o wa r d a t h e ol o g y of e ro s Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.’’ America is embroiled in a religious war over sexual union, and conservative Christians and the current administration insist that the sexual difference between man and woman defines the good. In the battle to save heterosexual unions, ‘‘what the Bible says’’ is one of the biggest guns conservative Christians fire: Genesis 1 and 2 to prove that ‘‘the two sexes’’ were created complementary and naturally heterosexual , and Romans 1 to prove homosexual sex contrary to nature. But such ideas cited as biblical truths are not self-evident renderings of scriptural treatments of sexual union. (Biblical authors applauded everything from procreative sex to trysts-in-the-grass, multiple wives, concubinage, intimate male friendships, and rape-as-hospitality.) Nor are they derived from some universal truth of human sexuality, as their proponents assert. Rather, they reflect a colonization of scripture by readers who import a set of assumptions that define ‘‘sexuality’’ for the modern West—namely, that humans naturally come in two genetic sexes, each of which possesses a constitutional orientation toward either the same or the other (opposite or complementary) sex. American Christians have writ the modern ideological hegemony of the two-sex model into the corpus of scripture, controlling both its meaning and the terms by which morally legitimate sex is determined. This essay undermines that colonization: first, by showing that the modern concept of ‘‘two natural sexes’’ upon which ‘‘sexuality’’ is based deploys a fictive ontology of gender complementarity to stabilize the heterosexist social order; and second, by arguing that the inscription of the two-sex model into scripture as a warrant for heterosexuality is destabilized at its scriptural foundation in the Pauline corpus. Neither Paul nor his early readers thought that humans naturally came in two biological sexes; like other ancients, they believed in a hierarchical continuum of relative masculinity. Males/men and females/women occupied the poles of that natural continuum, which admitted multiple genders and allowed for endless (and endlessly troubling) mutations of gender. Thus Paul’s earliest readers would have understood Romans 1:26–27 as a censure not of homosexual sex but of sex that threatened unnaturally to transform men and women into androgynes. Yet the Pauline letters also undercut this censure of gender shifting by queering gender difference d i an a m . s w a nc u t t 兩 67 within the body of Christ. Paul’s Christ is the eschatological recreation of the original androgyne, a distinct sex within whose body believers were materially, collectively remade. By ‘‘putting on’’ Christ’s body in baptism, they became ‘‘no longer male and female’’ (Gal. 3:28). As Christ’s lovers, they participated in an erotic union of spirit more holy than that of...