Jesus rejects purity culture: faith teaches embrace, not retreat [View all]

[The Great Open Dance]

Jesus models embrace, not purity. Purity culture creates insiders and outsiders, manufactures shame and self-righteousness, and separates us from one another. Purity culture is not of God. We know this, because Jesus didn’t practice it. Jesus practiced embrace of all those whom purity despised—lepers, tax collectors, the disabled, endangered women, remarried women, Samaritans, Canaanites, et al. In so doing, Jesus reveals the nature of God.

God holds the world in being by holding the world to God. God is embrace, and Jesus is God’s embrace of the world, an embrace that the church should continue today. The church does not preach to the world from afar, in a state of pristine purity. The church practices embrace. Embrace is intimacy without absorption, nearness that preserves relatedness. Embrace is love.

Practicing embrace in a divided world renders the church countercultural. When humanity has accustomed itself to inhumanity and deemed its inhumanity normal, then the church must behave in an abnormal way. Due to the difficulty of this mission, the temptation to mainstream accommodation will always be there.

Jesus warns that the mainstream leads to a desert. Our call is to preach agape. Preaching the universal, unconditional love of God is a pastoral response to ungodly cultural forces. These powers and principalities tell us we are not good enough, not pretty enough, not muscular enough, not smart enough, not anything enough, but that we can become enough if we buy this product or go to this restaurant or drive this car or live in this house. These forces have a hierarchical, comparative, personality-destabilizing metaphysic that they want to inscribe on our psyches.

Wisdom loves. The church must actively contest this inscription with an agapic metaphysic, revealing the cosmos to be grounded in love. In so doing, the church will practice the “subversive repetition” described by Judith Butler, which undercuts the repetitions of power, those ceaselessly repeated claims that disfigure our consciousness for the benefit of others.

What identity do we want our children to have? Within what culture will we raise our children? What repetitions will they hear? They should be told—persistently, repeatedly, ceaselessly—that they are the children of God, basking in the universal, unconditional love of God for all, a love from which they cannot separate themselves. All of us, including our children, need this assurance, which consumer culture denies us.

If the church fails to prophesy, then it fails to love: “Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent, for I am with you” (Acts 18 –10a). The church is gifted with Sophia, the Holy Spirit, who serves as our interlocutor with history and culture. She is the trusted counsel guiding us from personal misery to collective flourishing. The church’s call is to attend to her counsel, thereby materializing her wisdom in word and deed, until “wisdom is vindicated by her children” (Luke 7:35).

Wisdom is consciousness of unity, while ignorance subscribes to separation. But consciousness of unity cannot arise in isolation, and pride separates us from one another, so the Bible advises us to “be not wise in thine own eyes” (Proverbs 3 KJV). This admonition applies to both individuals and the church itself. God has made foolish the wisdom of the world, cynicism that masquerades as worldliness. This wisdom cannot know God, because to know God is to know our need for each other. Vanity is proud of its knowledge, but wisdom recognizes what it does not know. Therefore, the church must seek truth in others, with others, and for others, including other religions, in an attempt to develop a common wisdom that will be validated by the flourishing it creates. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 228-230)

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For further reading, please see:

Butler, Judith. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge, 1990.

Welcher, Rachel Joy. Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality. Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2020.