On February 21, 2015, I attended a men’s workshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand led by Christian counselors Chad Loftis and Sørin Joensen called “Sex, Women and Manning Up”. The thing I remember most was a discussion on metaphors for describing our sexuality. After showing us a clip of military reenactments from Pure Desire’s Conquer Series, they asked us what we thought of the idea that our struggle against lust is a constant battle. We decided that the battle metaphor helps us take sin seriously and to connect to one aspect of our male identity as warriors, but it also tends to evoke stress, fear, and anger, and could wear us down in the long run. Then they asked us to consider our sexuality and life as a garden. The garden metaphor can give us a more peaceful and long-term outlook, and is also connected to our male identity, as Adam, the first man, was given the mission of tending the garden of Eden as his corner of the world. By viewing our sexuality as both a battle to win and a garden to cultivate and weed, we got a more complete and life-giving picture.
Let’s consider how the multi-perspective idea is expressed in books of the last ten years. Mike Wilkerson in his book Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry (Crossway 2011) says that recovery is a combination of dealing with sin, rooted in idolatry, and suffering, which is often trauma caused by others. Jay Stringer relates sin with addiction as two concepts that "dovetail beautifully" in his book Unwanted (NavPress 2018), saying "the more I understand what the Bible says about sin, the more I understand the nature of addiction, and the more I understand what science reveals about addiction, the more I understand the nature of sin." Joe Rigney, in More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust (B&H 2021), puts all three themes together as complementary lenses. In his analysis, lust and sexual brokenness can be viewed simultaneously as sin to be conquered, addiction to get freedom from, and brokenness to be healed. His preferred theme is the first, but he says all three are needed in order to get a complete picture.
Recent debates on concupiscence (latent sinful desire or pre-desire) in relation to same-sex attraction have got me thinking about metaphors again. Authors such as Denny Burk and Heath Lambert (Transforming Homosexuality), Matthew P. W. Roberts (Pride), Rosaria Butterfield (Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age), and Jared Moore (A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction and The Lust of the Flesh), have argued stridently that homosexual attraction patterns are sin to be repented from. Moore, in particular, in chapter 2 of his dissertation, points back to Augustine's controversy with the Pelagian apologist Julian of Eclanum, in order to support the position that latent desires for sinful things, even if not consented to, are morally culpable sin because they come from original sin.
Meanwhile, I was also reading Craig Keener’s book The Mind of the Spirit, which I found cited in Susan Grove Eastman’s Paul and the Person, which was mentioned in a talk on sexuality at a friend’s church! (I’m a sucker for book recommendations and footnotes.)
Anyway, Keener (pp.22-23), citing historian Richard Sorabji’s book Emotion and Peace of Mind, explains how Stoic thinkers such as Seneca attempted to master their emotions through mental processes similar to modern-day mindfulness or cognitive behavioral therapy.
Keener says these exercises were helpful, but the Stoics underestimated the power of latent emotions and how they are intimately connected with rationality. However, Seneca did recognize ways in which the body started to become aroused as an emotion was arising, such as nostrils flaring and cheeks getting hot when we’re starting to get angry, or when the face becomes pale as we start to become afraid, or when the male organ becomes erect during the beginnings of sexual arousal. Seneca taught that we can recognize these signs in our body (called propatheia or pre-passions) and redirect our emotions through rational thinking in order to become calm again (a state of apatheia). (This line of thinking is picked up by modern neuroscience in books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and the idea of the lizard brain vs the rational brain.)
Keener, again citing Sorabji, says that Seneca’s observations about the body and preliminary mental disturbances were misunderstood by early church thinkers Origen and later Augustine, so that the Stoic language about pre-passions was eventually reappropriated from a term for blameless proto-feelings that can be redirected, into a doctrine focused on different degrees of sin in its latent desire form, leading poor tempted medieval monks and their mentors to ask questions like "Did you put yourself in the way of it?", “Did you enjoy it?” or “Did you let it linger?” Keener says that these kinds of questions can help us practice self-control, but also tend to make us obsessed with sin in an unhealthy way “that Romans 7 parodies.”
Additionally, Augustine's most extreme statements on concupiscence were made in the heat of controversy with Julian of Eclanum, a young follower of Pelagius who antagonized Augustine just as the latter had earlier antagonized Jerome -- Augustine died with his massive point-by-point refutation of Julian still unfinished.
So was Augustine wrong? And did countless doctrinal statements in church history, which recycled his conclusions, simply pass on his error? Maybe, but there’s more to it than that.
Continuing my hunt, I got a copy of Sorabji’s book – I read only a few pages, then got distracted by a book review by historian Peter Brown, who as a young man had read through Augustine's works in the original Latin, created the field of late antiquity studies, and become a history professor at Berkeley and Princeton on the strength of his Augustine biography without ever getting a PhD!
Brown (pp.188-191) says that Sorabji partly misses the point which Origen and Augustine were getting at. They did misunderstand and re-appropriate the language of the Stoics, but in this reappropriation, they were drawing from a Hebrew tradition that focused on the heart.
According to Brown, the Stoics lived in the upper strata of Roman society as advisors to powerful leaders who needed to recognize and defuse their anger and other strong emotions before they made rash decisions and killed innocent people.
Early Christians, on the other hand, lived in small, tight-knit communities at the margins of Roman society, and they were concerned about group unity – they would test their own hearts, trying to see if there were any hidden motives of self-will "like a snake hidden in the dung" (John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent 15:79) that might grow up to make them antisocial and so disrupt the group, interfering with love for God and neighbor. Early monks and their mentors, meditating on Psalm 139:13 ("you have possessed my inward parts") and Acts 4:32 ("the multitude of believers had one heart and one soul, and none of them said that anything that he possessed was his own, but all things were common to them"), strived for integrity and selflessness even in their dreams and fantasies at night. (For more on this theme, see Brown's book The Body and Society chapters 2 and 11, where he traces singleness of heart vs double-souledness from the Old Testament to the Desert Fathers.)
Brown encapsulates the two views with two metaphors: "Stoic therapy was like the brisk defusing of a ticking bomb. The therapy favoured by the Desert Fathers, by contrast, was concerned to measure the force of a coiled spring—the power of self-will in the depths of the heart." (p.191.)
On November 9, 2023, I heard Andy Robinson speak on a LivingOut webinar called “Theological, Pastoral, and Cultural Reflections on Concupiscence”. He said two insightful things: first, that same-sex attraction and other kinds of disordered desires are signs of a heart problem, and second, that we mustn’t emphasize that Jesus’ temptations were different from ours due to our original, indwelling sin nature, because that goes counter to the whole thrust of the New Testament, which is to comfort us by showing that Jesus understands.
The admission of a “heart problem”, I think, is key. It is ambiguous enough that it doesn’t condemn someone who is struggling with internal temptation, but also acknowledges the wisdom of those who want us to take heart-level struggles seriously, including the wisdom of those early Christians. This lets us drink from many different streams...
- Codependency, or believing we need certain specific people more than we need God, is related to idolatry. (See Ed Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small; David Powlison, Making All Things New; Kelly Needham, Friend-ish)
- Gender dysphoria, a felt incongruence between one's biological sex and one's mind, could stem from or lead to envy of the opposite sex. (See Rosaria Butterfield, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age)
- Desire for someone else’s spouse is related to envy of that married couple.
- Dissatisfaction with singleness is related to ungratefulness for the gift of one’s present status.
- Forming our identity around our experience of same-sex attraction runs the risk of eclipsing our identity as God’s children. (See Andrew Bunt, Finding Your Best Identity)
- Our particular pleasure palate might have been formed in part by the desire to relive or gain power over childhood trauma when we felt violated or powerless. (See Jay Stringer, Unwanted)
- Fear of the opposite sex, desire for intimacy with the same sex, or desire to disidentify with our birth sex might be maladaptive coping mechanisms related to trauma or unhealthy childhood roles in our family of origin, although this is not the case for everyone.
Laurie Krieg and Matt Krieg unpack some of these heart issues in their book Journey Well. I appreciate their diagram with the heart composed of concentric circles from triggers on the surface, down to behaviors, feelings, beliefs, and finally core needs related to past experiences and inborn sin nature. There is no guarantee that addressing these things will completely remove internal temptations; the more important goal is to write a new story that puts God at the center, opens us up to receive his love, and makes meaning out of these conflicts.
I think there’s a place for both the time bomb metaphor at the trigger level, and the coiled spring metaphor at the core need level. With the former, in times of temptation, it is comforting to realize that the Tempting Voice or "the thoughts" (logismoi in Evagrius's system) are not our true self, even if they feel like us.
- we can recognize "it's not me, it's just my brain" (Jeffrey Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding)
- we can say with Paul that the tempting thought "is no longer I ... but [S]in living in me..." (Romans 7:20), but the new reality is that "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20)
- we can "say it, separate it, and stare at it", and "stop, challenge, choose" (Craig Blanchette, building on Wayne Scott Andersen's Habits of Health).
- we can "surf the urge", knowing that soon it will dissipate (Alan Marlatt), since "the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever" (1 John 2:17)
However, once the heat of temptation has passed, we can consider that coiled spring of errant self-will, and start to do the deep work of knowing our hearts and seeking the roots of our desires. Here we can take another helpful thread from Augustine, viewing all our desires as disordered loves which we can continually redirect back to God, our true joy and delight, with the help of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, and prayer.
As we build habits of reordering our loves and our thoughts, eventually it may be possible to see another person's beauty and give thanks to God for this fellow image-bearer, without obsessing over them. (See John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent 15:60.) If we're not there yet and need to simply avert our eyes, walk away, and redirect our thoughts, it's good to realize our present limitations. (See The Shepherd of Hermas Vision 1, Ch.1 on opposite-sex attraction, and Barsanuphius's letter #258 to Dorotheos on same-sex attraction, also mentioned in The Body and Society p.234.)
For example, I might feel a desire to get the attention of someone I'm attracted to. If this person is married, or of the same sex, or an unbeliever, or just not right for me to focus on at this time, then trying extra-hard to get them to notice me might be unwise -- in Martin Buber's terminology, I am currently in I-It mode, rather than I-Thou mode. And yet there is at its root a God-given core need for being seen and known -- maybe just not by this particular person. So I have to take a breath and maybe write out my thoughts in my journal, or pray and ask God to show me that he sees and knows me. I can open my Bible and meditate on Psalm 139 or the story of Hagar, who said "I have now seen the one who sees me." Then I can ask for help from other believers who I'm not attracted to, and let God show me his care through a variety of spiritual sibling and parent relationships.
And at the same time, as Paul says, I must “put to death” whatever belongs to my earthly nature. So when that fantasy of the perfect flirty conversation with the wrong person starts to rear its head, I can push pause, and tell myself, "The Tempting Voice wants that, but that's not for me. God has something better in store for me." And then try to realize that I'm not the most important thing in that person's world, and that's as it should be, because I have other good things to focus on today.
Put to death, redirect, nurture, cultivate, focus our vision, walk in the Spirit… all of these are metaphors for different aspects of our “journey” and “growth process” (which are themselves metaphors). Taking a multi-perspective view in this way is more helpful, in my opinion, than assuming that all of Scripture, or all of church history thought one way about sin. There are a million metaphors for sin, and a million metaphors for salvation. Let’s take the good from all of them and see which ones the Holy Spirit wants to use with us today.
