Aim at Heaven and you get Earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you get neither.
—C. S. Lewis
My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
—Jeremiah 2:13
At this point in the book, you’ll have to bear with me a bit as my story shifts. My journey to calling myself a celibate gay Christian is far from over (and will continue to develop through the final chapter), but publicly committing my life to celibacy as a gay Christian was a watershed moment. What I’d like to do now is begin to shift into more specifics about what I’ve learned (and am still learning!), to share the convictions and principles that inform that decision. My story is a testament to God’s quiet revolution in my heart. But these principles, I pray, can be used as a manifesto for a revolution in yours.
During my time as an activist, we frequently used the famous slogan “Love is love” while fighting the orthodox Christian definition of marriage. Love, as we defined it, was our highest ideal and our sacred entity. That, in our minds, settled the issue.
But while our slogan was popular, it was shallow at best. “Love is love” doesn’t mean that much semantically, and it provides no definition of what love actually is. Nor can it differentiate between the various kinds of human love and desire. Is it really all that simple? No! Love has many commonalities, but part of what makes the human experience so rich is the multiplicity of loves that we experience. A mother’s love is not a friend’s love. A friend’s faithfulness and a total stranger’s act of compassion are both touching and wonderful. But they are not the same—cannot be, should not be.
Love, I have come to learn, is not God. Flip that. God is love. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is the definition of love. This difference changes everything. We are caught up in arms greater than our own, feeling the possibility of being accepted not by our mirror but by our maker.
The cross is where that strange and holy God most clearly reveals his love. There he gave his very self so that the whole world could know him and enjoy the intimacy we were designed for, and without which everything else breaks down. Human romance and attempts at religion can never provide lasting meaning. Only God can. In that sense, the cross is God’s intimate act of self-giving, his gentle way of critiquing our love of money, sex, self, romance, fame, and, above all, power. These weaker loves, these idols we raise in our own image, could never compare with his infinitely greater love.
Jesus taught that both the worst sin and the most sacred worship originate from the same place: the heart. Think of that revolutionary concept! What does it mean? Simply, that God’s love should displace all others and occupy the primary space in our hearts. It is, simply, what we were made for.
As Christians, the romance we should most celebrate is the marriage of heaven and earth, between Christ, the Bridegroom, and his bride, the church. It is the greatest of all love stories.
But notice this: the faithfulness of intentional celibacy is part of this love story. Both Christ and the bride ought to have only one lover. Practically, all lesser human loves, even the incredible intimacy of marriage, is a half shadow of that great love we were made to experience.
Let me be clear: this does not mean that we are all called to celibacy or that it makes one a super-Christian. That can turn to idolatry of lifestyle as much as marriage. But the core skills of celibacy—discipline, self-control, choosing a greater love at the sacrifice of a lesser—these are all key Christian skills pointing straight to the heart of Christ. No matter your calling, single or married, you must grow in them to grow in Jesus.
So why do most Christians seem far more concerned with romantic love than with God’s great story? In many congregations, when an engagement or wedding is announced, there is often greater enthusiasm than when God is worshiped. In contrast, when someone commits themselves to celibacy, there is no celebration. The person is regarded as an abnormality.
Yes, biblical marriage is a beautiful expression of romantic love that glorifies God. But as Wesley Hill says, “The New Testament views the church—rather than marriage—as the primary place where human love is best expressed and experienced.”21 For C. S. Lewis, it was not the loves in and of themselves that were bad, whether romantic or family love, but the order in which they were placed in the human heart.22 It sounds like heresy in our culture, but romantic and sexual love are not the deepest expressions of our humanness. Unconditional love—God’s love—is.
In his essay Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI distinguishes between agape, that perfect, self-sacrificial love of God, and eros, that passion of sexual yearning, love, or desire for life and union most of us are so familiar with. Agape love, he wrote, sanctifies and transforms eros by turning it toward the worship of God—rechannelling our passions to further his kingdom.
And Pope Benedict XVI is not alone! On the other side of the cultural room, the gay Catholic writer and activist Andrew Sullivan wrote that he believes “we live in a world . . . in which respect and support for eros has acquired the hallmarks of a cult.” In his book Love Undetectable, he states,
The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t mean the principle of giving and mutual regard that lies at the heart of friendship [but] love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence.23
Those who define themselves through eros are actually seeking the transcendence of union with God. But they will never find it in human relationships. Looking there, they set themselves up for the heartbreak of a lifetime. We humans are caught in a love triangle of our own, for there are relationships between agape and eros, without doubt. But we have to choose agape—getting eros thrown in, to paraphrase Lewis.
As I look at our messy humanity, my heart breaks for God. We choose against him, nearly constantly. He is our jilted divine lover. He designed the good things of marriage and sexuality to be a means to worship him, not the object of our worship. But as the apostle Paul explains in Romans 1, we have all committed idolatry by exchanging the Creator for created things.
Often when Christians focus on the world’s sins, we neglect to communicate the solution: the love of Jesus Christ. In failing that way, we condemn people before they’ve even had the chance to know God’s grace and understand that he is what they are really seeking.
Hear me well: homosexuality is not an evangelistic issue. It is a discipleship issue. So we must approach it that way. But we also need to remember that without a knowledge of God’s grace, the gift of the Spirit, and an understanding of God’s satisfying love, discipleship kills rather than gives life, condemns rather than convicts. Celibacy is no different. Gay or same-sex-attracted celibacy must be a response to God’s love, not a legalistic bottling up of our human desires. It is about the redirected affections of a transformed heart.
Once we belong to Christ, we all—no matter our orientation—need to be discipled by him in the Spirit and be willing to be purified in our desires. Churches must not leave LGBTQI people in the dark pastorally and theologically about their particular situation. If they do, the entire body suffers from the idolatrous effects of a disordered love in the whole church body.
Over the years since my conversion, I have seen many initiatives, such as Matthew Vines’ Reformation Project, which promote the affirmation of same-sex marriage in the church. Matthew Vines writes, “Christians throughout history have affirmed that lifelong celibacy is a spiritual gift and calling, not a path that should be forced upon someone.”24
I agree that we must be careful not to present celibacy as a moral code. But what many biblical revisionists overlook is that both celibacy and marriage are a calling to find our fulfillment in Christ. Celibacy is neither an easy gift nor a repressive burden. It is an opportunity—an opportunity, not that different from marriage, to trust in God’s capacity to provide for our need for intimacy. Forsaking all others . . . Do the words of the marriage vow ring hollow when we speak them to God? Any lack we presently experience in celibacy can be supplied with what Nouwen describes as the three qualities of God’s love in us: intimacy (closeness), fecundity (fullness), and ecstasy (self-sharing). The poverty of spirit experienced in celibacy provides the opportunity for a deeper experience of divine love.25 This is not to dismiss the real sacrifices of the celibate life. (Trust me, I know them.) But it gives them their proper context.
In Isaiah 56, the prophet receives a word from God about the future acceptance of eunuchs, or people whose sexual orientation or gendered state is different from the norm. The fulfillment of this prophetic text was God’s embrace of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 after Jesus’ resurrection. This story was radical in a society that saw eunuchs, or sexually-other people, as unclean and unable to enter God’s holy presence in the temple.26 But today, because of Jesus, LGBTQI people are welcomed into the church, the family and temple of God.
The apostle Paul, like many of the Christians after him, was also celibate in a society that expected marriage. In other places in the New Testament, the celibate life is seen as godly and a sign of dedication to Jesus. Revelation 14:4 says those who decide to remain celibate are the firstfruits of Christ’s saving work: “[Those who remained celibate] follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They were purchased from among mankind and offered as firstfruits to God and the Lamb.” It echoes Isaiah 56, which promises eunuchs “a name better than [having] sons and daughters” (v. 5)—the very name of Jesus Christ, who was himself single and childless. If Jesus was celibate and the ultimate example of human flourishing for all of us, gay or straight, then isn’t it clear that celibacy is not an inhumane sentence for gay people like me but actually a legitimate, and even honorable, choice?
The church needs to return to a view of celibacy as a valid option and a sacred gift to give in response to Jesus’ love. If the church does not recognize and value this truth, the lives of celibate gay Christians will be indescribably difficult, and the church will remain locked in idolatry.
In Christ, I discovered, my romantic status no longer defines my value, my wholeness, or my well-being. The gospel has become increasingly good news to me because in my celibacy, I am promised a name of precious worth. Much like the apostle Paul, who considered himself a spiritual father to Timothy and Titus, as a celibate gay man, I can sire spiritual children through the gospel.
Embraced, fulfilled, loved. I was learning that I am all of this and more, and I was eager to see how Christ would use me next to further his kingdom.