Redeeming Desire and Becoming Our True Selves
Sex clearly holds a privileged place within our culture; if we worship in the temple of consumerism, then sex is its god. Erotic appeal is used to sell everything from razors to race cars; even the G-rated, animated Disney movies we watch with our kids star alluring princesses with adult sex appeal. High-profile politicians and other public figures sacrifice hard-won careers and reputations for the sake of sexual liaisons they seem unable to resist. Their willingness to pay such a high price for a moment of passion points to the power of desire to direct all we do, for better or worse. In an age of rich digital media, lightning-fast networks, and aggressive consumerism, nobody is immune from this daily reality. The book of Proverbs’ warning to “guard your heart”1 becomes an important guide, because our affections and desires so easily take on a gravitational force and direction of their own.
Although the term “desire” is often used to describe our sexual urges, it encompasses a much broader spectrum of human longing. We may pour our lives into high-flying careers or respected ministries out of a desire for affirmation, security, control, or a sense of self-worth. This drive for success gets hooked to our personal identity. Even sexual longing may not present itself in the form of an aesthetic romantic attraction. One self-confessed sex addict explained to his counselor that it wasn’t the sex he craved but the sense of shame that came with it. This craving sprang from his upbringing within an emotionally abusive family environment. In adulthood, his sexual desire became a force that he craved and could not control, even though he didn’t like it.2
Human longing—sexual desire in its broadest sense—is what makes us tick. In this sense, Freud’s focus on sexuality as the core of personal identity expresses an essential (albeit distorted) truth. If this is true—if desire forms the foundation of human personhood—then desire is also the decisive core of Christian formation. Contemporary culture has simply confirmed this reality in a counterfeit form, seeking to redirect this desire into the narrow pursuit of sex, consumer products, career success, and so on. The hijacking of human desire and sex doesn’t just tap into our sinful core, as some believe, but actually taps into our essential sexual core. In other words, our culture did not create sexuality. It has just twisted God’s good creation.
Within the context of discipleship, if vision is the bedrock on which we stand and the horizon line that we fix our eyes upon, then desire is the beating heart, the energizing core, of the Christian life. Christian leaders need to redefine and redeem people’s conception of desire, which has been so heavily sexualized. Although this approach presents pastoral risks, it is our only way to get to the heart of the matter, to transform people in their faith and lives. Indeed, the most common weakness in Christians’ sexual lives is not failing to know what to do but failing to want to do it. Christian living, then, is more a question of our ultimate desires than our knowledge. As James K. A. Smith observes, when we try to address discipleship through ideas and beliefs alone, “it’s as if the church is pouring water on our head to put out a fire in our heart.”3 Addressing issues of sexual desire cannot simply mean checking a box in our discipleship program or covering a topic in a chapter of a book, because desire is the essential core of the Christian life, the wellspring from which all else flows. Unless Christian leaders attend to their hearts, disciples will be left on thin ice.
Painting a Portrait of the Desiring Self
Given the challenges we face with modern sexual relationships, we can take comfort from knowing that one of the most influential leaders in the church’s history had a problem with his libido. If Paul’s moral confidence seems a bit out of reach, Augustine of Hippo speaks from the trenches of the sexual battlefield. Before his conversion, Augustine describes a problematic sex life in which he failed to keep his urges under control. He notes that his singular motivation in early life was “to love and be loved” but that his pursuit of love without God led to the corruption of good things and a voracious appetite for false beauty.4 As a brilliant young scholar, he searched through the classical philosophies and religions of his day to find truth, beauty, and goodness—that is, a vision of a bigger reality that would bring him freedom.
Some way into this spiritual odyssey, and partly through the preaching, friendship, and example of a church leader, Bishop Ambrose of Milan, Augustine came to see the truth, beauty, and goodness of God, going through what he describes as an intellectual conversion.5 Seeing God as the source of all being gave him a vision of true reality. But this vision of goodness only increased Augustine’s frustration and led him into a spiritual crisis. Contrary to the wisdom of Socrates and Plato, knowledge and vision of God, by themselves, proved insufficient to bring about real freedom. Seeing the goodness of God did not change Augustine nor help to curb his passions, which remained disordered and uncontrollable. In truth, this spiritual enlightenment shone a painful light on his brokenness and the depth of his addiction. Torn between the truth about God and the truth about himself, Augustine prayed one of the church’s most honest and enduring prayers: “Lord give me chastity and self-control, but not just yet!”6
Augustine’s full conversion happened next. Having seen a vision of God, he encountered the living Christ, who took him on a journey within himself through his “memory,” meaning his whole consciousness and self-identity. Leading Augustine through his past, Jesus revealed the lies that had shaped his life and spoke truth in their place, thereby healing his whole identity, including his memory. As Augustine prayed, “Look into my heart, my God, look within. See this, as I remember it, my hope; for you cleanse me of these flawed emotions.”7 This vivid encounter of God’s intimate grace brought Augustine genuine and enduring freedom.8
This conversion experience and his subsequent theological reflection convinced Augustine that we cannot truly love God and live freely through mere knowledge or self-discipline. On the contrary, we can only respond to God’s grace through a fundamental reorientation of our whole selves, which itself is the work of God’s grace. We must come to love the truth before it can become our guide. And we can only come to love the truth by allowing God to love us first. As Augustine writes: “Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”9 For Augustine, “longing is the heart’s treasury”; or as James K. A. Smith puts it, “To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are. Our (ultimate) love is constitutive of our identity.”10
One of the myths we still carry from Enlightenment rationalism is the idea that clarity of belief by itself will bring about personal transformation. In its simplest form, this popular model of discipleship says that if we know a biblical text or principle, then it will naturally take shape in our lives. Yet our culture’s renewed emphasis on feeling and emotional resonance helps reveal what Augustine described many centuries ago. Human identity is deeper and more complex than the simplistic cognitive model of personhood. We certainly grow through rational understanding, but in order to come to full Christian maturity, our imaginations, feelings, intuitions, and convictions all need to be aligned with our faith.
In one of his many sermons, Augustine describes how God’s original gift to us is our orientation to “the good”—being created in his image—and God’s promise is that in the end we will be made like him. As we respond to this gift and promise in our daily lives, Augustine says, “the image is progressive: as false loves are sloughed off, noble desires are consummated, and the true self emerges.”11 According to Augustine, all is gift and all is desire because we can only come to discern, want, and pursue good desires to the extent that God frees us from our false loves.
I think Augustine gets to the heart of the Christian life as we actually experience it. We do find ourselves a battleground of desires, and yet it is desire itself that will lead us to victory. This victory is always a divine gift on the path to the fulfillment of God’s ultimate promise that one day we will be completely free.12 C. S. Lewis affirms this conviction that it is not the taming of desire that will set us free but rather the unleashing and enlarging of true desire: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”13
Chasing Chastity: To Will or to Want?
Sadly, the running battle between rationalism and romanticism in the modern world has distorted the biblical vision of who we are and what really motivates us. Rationalism has tended to set the agenda in modern ethics. In turn, this has affected the way we disciple people within the church. Our cognitive model focuses on what we should do by setting out clear moral rules, rather than thinking about how we might become the sort of people who can actually live by these convictions. The flaw in this cognitive approach is its assumption that everyone is morally mature and has the power to do whatever he or she chooses to do. But the heart of the human crisis and the challenge of Christian discipleship is not a lack of knowledge but a problem within the human heart. We are not, it turns out, as free as we think.
“Chastity” is a deeply misunderstood concept today. We tend to associate it solely with sexual celibacy, but chastity is a virtue that relates equally to singleness and marriage; it is not directly about sex at all. Chastity is a disposition or orientation of the self that determines everything else we do. James Houston illuminates this by describing chastity as emotional sincerity or integrity, by which we express our feelings honestly.14 This explains why counseling and therapy provide such a powerful experience: for many it is the first time they have spoken openly about their inner lives.
This view of chastity also explains the destructive power of Christian models of discipleship based on a “morality of knowledge.” This idea is rooted in certain strains of classical philosophy that sought to dominate the emotional life by reason and to suppress the passions by an act of the will. As we’ve seen, this war between will and impulse was placed at the center of modern identity during the Enlightenment, creating a “head/heart” split within the modern self. The cognitive model makes the fatal mistake of believing that reason, rather than redeemed affections, can lead us into the good life.
Yet as Houston says, such a “morality of knowledge” is not Christian at all, because the heart of the gospel is God’s love working in us and through us to transform our lives.15 When the mind dominates, it censors and distorts our emotional life, leading us into a life of simulation rather than genuine communion with God and others. As John MacMurray explains: “To tamper with the sincerity of your emotional life is to destroy your inner integrity, to become unreal to yourself and to others, to lose the capacity of knowing what you feel. There is nothing more destructive of all that is valuable in human life.”16
Chastity, meaning true feeling, is our goal as Christians—but it is here where we need God most. It would be a cruel irony if we sought emotional sincerity by ourselves, as an act of the will! Indeed, this is the ill-fated quest for “authenticity,” as we explored earlier, that promises freedom and personal integrity but leads deeper into the disordered desires and deception of the false self. By contrast, chastity is the humble acknowledgment that we cannot love anyone or anything authentically without the love of God.
The secret of all genuine human desire is that God, not humans, is the source of love. It is he who loves in and through us. Leaders should ask themselves, then, whether they exemplify and encourage chastity as emotional integrity and honesty within their church communities.
Reforming Human Desire
How do we respond to this challenge? One of the spiritual giants of the church, the medieval Cistercian reformer Bernard of Clairvaux, offers an insight. Bernard is a helpful conversation partner for Christian leaders today because he was also trying to form disciples within a highly sexualized culture. The French courts of the twelfth century exemplified the cultural ideals of chivalry and romantic love, which were akin to our culture’s expressive sexuality. Rather than simply rejecting his culture’s disordered romantic impulses wholesale, Bernard sought to redirect these sexual passions toward God. He saw sexual desire as a positive and essential part of human identity that reflects both our Creator and the original human condition in Eden. Tragically, the fall led to the disorienting of these good desires. Bernard describes this in terms of humans being made in the image and likeness of God: the divine “image” refers to our being created as desiring creatures (our essential nature), while our divine “likeness” (our virtuous character) is something we lost when these desires became disordered through sin.
Bernard’s goal was to encourage the reordering of these powerful desires, which had already been formed in the priorities of romantic culture, directing them instead into a passionate desire for God and each other. Bernard did not focus on God in the abstract but saw the incarnation, Jesus as God in the flesh, as the key to Christian spirituality. He saw Jesus’s coming as God’s act of divine love, the “divine kiss.” Only by immersing ourselves in this intimate gesture could our hearts be changed.17
The Journey into Divine Desire
Bernard taught that our desires can only be reordered as we are led by the Spirit through different stages of God’s love—essentially the progressive journey from self-consciousness to God-consciousness—as God’s love seeps into our deepest being.18 As we journey deeper into God’s love, we become more attuned to loving like God loves, and we better understand who we really are in light of his love. Although our desires start out as self-absorbed and self-directed, by stages they are drawn outward into passionate love for God and others until we come to a place of true self-acceptance where we love ourselves as God loves us.
True self-love, then, is not the focus but a by-product of allowing God’s love to pervade and change us. When we experience this divine approval at our deepest core, we become able to love God and neighbor from our hearts. As we breathe in the Spirit’s love, we breathe it out into our practical relationships in the church and beyond. This is the picture of relational joy, peace, and intimacy envisioned in Revelation 19 at the eschatological wedding feast, when all self-consciousness and envy will be set aside, and God’s love will be all in all.
Bernard’s progressive journey of desire shows how Christian discipleship both transforms us and exposes the counterfeit modern quest for “authenticity.” This quest is a sham. It seeks to make peace with our false self or, more accurately, the self that is enmeshed in false desires. This form of “self-love” is deceptive because it denies the battle going on beneath this superficial détente. Although this sort of self-acceptance may present itself as self-assurance, what often lies at the heart of the modern “authentic” self is really self-hatred or shame. Because we have to maintain a gap between who we really are and what we present to others, false self-love sabotages our relationships and our ability to love others. We cannot let anyone into the inner sanctuary of our lives because we fear what they will find there. Far from being authentic selves, we become chimeric selves—shape-shifters who present whatever persona we believe will make us acceptable or lovable.
In contrast to this sham authenticity, the Christian journey of desire leads us through repentance—the “putting off” of false desires—into the soaking presence of true Life. Only within the unconditional love of divine acceptance can we come to understand and embrace our true identity.
I want to stress that this is not some esoteric spiritual quest. On the contrary, the journey of genuine desire is the critical hinge for Christian formation. True self-acceptance based on our experience of Jesus’s love is the only firm foundation from which we can love others freely and sacrificially. Without the freedom wrought by divine acceptance, we tend to curve in on ourselves, becoming slaves to self-consciousness.
Although Bernard’s goals were primarily spiritual (his monks became or remained celibate), he shows us something essential about the human condition and the project of discipleship. If we are, at our core, desiring beings, then the Spirit must reach that part of us to restore us to the image and likeness of Christ. And if our sexuality is intricately connected to our spirituality, then our sexual desires must be properly directed to God before they can be healthily expressed in our sexual lives.
Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free19
The apostle Paul is often depicted as the author of doctrine and destroyer of heresies. Yet like Augustine and Bernard after him, Paul was a theologian of the heart. We see this clearly in his encouragement to the Ephesian church to live as “children of light”:
So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.
That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.20
Paul makes it clear that the ignorance of the gentiles’ understanding and ways of living springs not from their lack of knowledge—in the narrow sense of beliefs, philosophy, or doctrine—but from the hardening of their hearts. The old false self needs to be set aside because it is being corrupted by its deceitful desires. This image of the “hardening of their hearts” is reinforced by the observation that they have “lost all sensitivity,” a classical expression describing callused skin that loses any sensation of pain.21
Similarly, in Romans 1:21 Paul says, “They became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened” (NRSV). The term “futile” is often used in the New Testament to describe idolatry, the refusal to acknowledge God as the source of life and goodness. In contrast to Bernard’s journey into genuine desire, idolatry progressively conditions and numbs the mind so that eventually it becomes unable to discern or intuit goodness, and so it becomes morally disoriented. These “senseless minds,” which think without feeling, lead the gentiles into confusion as their consciences become “seared”—similar to the vivid language in 1 Timothy 4:2.
For Paul, then, the desiring heart is the key to putting on the new true self, which has been created to be like God. The comprehensive transformation of our desires within the true self allows us to see life in a whole new way and to live accordingly. This is no abstract doctrine for Paul. The reorientation of our hearts has radical, real-life consequences. As an example, Paul puts his finger right on a poignant irony about human sexuality, as true now as it was then. It is not the out-of-control fires of passion that have led the gentiles into an insatiable addiction to every form of unhealthy sexual expression. Quite the opposite. It is the deadening of desire within their numb hearts and senseless minds that gives them a continual lust for more. Paul’s words strike a chord in light of the hypersexual nature of modern culture. He explains why sex today has become so important and yet has also been trivialized as a form of entertainment.
As sex has lost its essential meaning as the mysterious bond between husband and wife at the center of God’s creation, people have not lost interest in sex but have gone on an addictive quest for more of it and in more extreme forms. It is no surprise that as sex becomes further removed from real relationships, the insatiable quest for personal gratification has intensified. The numbing and detachment of desire empowers the forces of addiction. Describing the futile cycle of drug addiction, neuroscientist Norman Doidge explains that an addict will shoot up even if he knows that the dose is insufficient to give him a high. Such is the power of “tolerance” that the addict will take the drug even when he knows it cannot satisfy his craving.
It is no wonder that the recent growth of online pornography has turned the previously rare term “sexual addiction” into a mainstream phenomenon within counseling, pop culture, and the church. This is the age-old dynamic of idolatry. At the beginning, an idol promises total satisfaction at no personal cost. It presents the illusion that we are in full control. Unable to fulfill us, the idol draws us further in and requires more from us with each encounter. In the end, having promised us everything at no cost, the idol’s false promises ultimately take everything. Having offered us control, the idol becomes our master.
We see this in the sad reality of so many marriages and relationships damaged or destroyed by the intrusion and false promises of pornography or extramarital affairs. In the 1990s the feminist Andrea Dworkin justifiably warned that online pornography risked turning men into dangerous beasts. The truth is even more tragic. Pornography, with its unrealistic fantasies of open-ended desire, actually kills genuine desire by forming men who are becoming incapable of loving their wives. Extramarital affairs offer a similar debilitating illusion. A spouse may initially be drawn to a lover who offers unbridled passion without demanding control or representing the mundane responsibilities of domestic life. The lover is always sexually engaged and never has a headache! Yet such lovers eventually demand the central role, no longer happy to sit in the background. The illusion of “free love” always breaks down under the crashing waves of reality. By offering us alluring illusions, sin distorts and captures our desires, bending them in unintended directions. Yet whereas sin disciplines and enslaves desire, the gospel heals and liberates desire from sin.
Indeed, Paul sees putting on the true self with its new desires as the key to living in the light. As children of light, we are to be imitators of God without “even a hint of sexual immorality,” because this does not fit the profile for God’s family.22 These are strong words, but Paul does not expect us to constrain our sexual passions through sheer self-control, as the Stoics and others taught in his day. The healing and redirection of what we ultimately long for provides the key to living as children of light. We need to be clear that the Christian journey of desire—that is, true discipleship—will not be a smooth or speedy road. It is to be walked with hope, courage, and perseverance, always tethered to the unshakable grace and love of God.
Finding the Right Balance: Reconnecting Fragmented Selves
As we seek to usher people into the Christian journey of redeemed desire, we are faced with a problem. Our schizophrenic culture has caused a split between the head and heart—between thought and emotion—and so has destroyed the wholeness of human identity.23 “Being rational” is seen as thinking purely with your head, trying to weed out other ways of discerning, such as intuitive feel or gut instinct. Emotions are seen as confusing, unreliable, frightening, or hard to control. A budding relationship may be subjected to an impossible barrage of overanalysis and faultfinding that pronounces it dead on arrival. The perfection trap, where no relationship will ever do, can become a form of self-protection or idolatrous fantasy. As a result, we never expose ourselves to an actual relationship.
At the other extreme, we tend to be led into relationships simply by a powerful attraction to someone, or we might set sexual boundaries according to what feels right. This great divorce between the rational and emotive modes has had a dramatic influence on modern sexuality and relationships. Many young Christian couples seem to be in a furious hurry to rush down the wedding aisle, often cramming their courting into a few short months. The priority of these relationships seems to be getting to the altar rather than preparing for the rigors and responsibilities of a common life together.
Affirming the Deep Self: The Thinking Heart
The path to maturity in faith and life involves “learning by heart.” Saint Benedict described this as bringing the thoughts of the mind into the heart so that the whole person stands in the presence of God, being transformed through this communion.24 In a similar way, Paul prays for the Ephesians that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you.”25 In classical philosophy, “vision”—or seeing—was a way of describing the mind. Paul is asking God to illuminate their thinking hearts. If our moral compass is only oriented by what resonates within us, then our susceptibility to self-deception exposes us to being led astray by these impulses. In contrast, the thinking heart is able to discern between these different emotions and to test them within the boundaries of the Christian life. Whether we are leaders or laypeople, like Paul we need to be midwives of “the heart set free.”
Sadly, some influential voices within the modern church have been tempted to define Christian “love” as neutral soil into which we can plant whatever we choose. Giving his support to same-sex marriage, for instance, former pastor Rob Bell draws on Genesis 2 to explain that we need more love, more monogamy, more fidelity, and so on. When asked if he is “for same-sex marriage,” he replied, “I am for marriage.”26 Yet Genesis 2 is a strange text to use for such an assertion, forming as it does the cornerstone of Christian sexual anthropology. It shows that intimacy within heterosexual marriage is purposeful or teleological (it can bear new life), normative (it expresses God’s intended design for sexual relationships), and comprehensive (the complementary natures and bodies of men and women in marriage are a reflection of God).27
Bell’s theological innovation replants Eden with a new moral ecology. Yet Christian love, as brought to life in Scripture, is a flourishing garden with defined walls and keen discernment regarding what we cultivate and which fruit we taste. Even more so, following our retreat from Eden, there is a presumption that what we should cultivate is not what naturally grows within us. Indeed, our deepest desires are likely to lead us astray, and it took nothing less than God-in-the-flesh to reverse this destructive dynamic. It is strange, then, that parts of the church have been so eager in recent years to bless almost any form of sexual expression, provided it is given and received with genuine feeling and continuity. This development is a reflection of the modern authentic self rather than the genuine Christian self. It demonstrates why Christian desire must be trained within the boundaries of Christian truth. Only this bold synthesis will enable the necessary development of the “thinking heart.”
Caught in a Love Triangle
James Houston describes a helpful test for the healthy functioning of desire within intimate relationships, both with God and with others. Love, Houston states, is a triangle with three necessary and mutually supporting sides: passion, intimacy, and commitment.28 Passion motivates love; it is the physiological attraction that compels us toward an “other.” By itself, though, it is a fickle force that can go astray or die down after the initial heat dissipates. Intimacy deepens love, as physical and emotional closeness come with increasing trust, honesty, and warmth. Commitment protects love by providing a safe context in which it can thrive. It acts like a wall that prevents the animals of doubt, defensiveness, or competing lovers from destroying the tender fruit growing in the garden. It provides a secure place where vulnerability, trust, and exclusivity can blossom.
If, however, one or more of these sides of the triangle is consistently absent from or overactive within our romantic attachments or our relationship with God, it may point to a scarring or lack of proper attachment that we carry from our childhood. Until we allow God to get to the heart of the issue and heal our foundational desires, our intimate relationships will be lopsided, consistently marked by these dysfunctional patterns.
At the age of thirty, after a string of relational crises, Ben realized that his romantic relationships always fell into one of two categories. Either he was motivated by control and felt compelled to rescue someone in need (who then became overly dependent on him), or else he found himself entering into an emotionally detached relationship. Unnerved by this consistent pattern, he began to meet with a Christian counselor.
At a certain point, the counselor asked him to describe his mother. For as long as Ben could remember, she had suffered from depression. Unable to cope with the chaotic demands of young children, she had put Ben and his older brother into full-time day care from six weeks old, even though she was not working at the time. When they were at home, the children had to stay in their bedrooms for long periods of time because she was unable to cope with their noisy presence. They learned early on that they needed to tune in to their mother’s needs rather than the other way around.
Ben realized that this lack of emotional warmth and care during his early childhood had established the pattern for his adult relationships, drawing him into consistently unhealthy dynamics. He found himself either rescuing emotionally dependent women or else becoming emotionally detached, two ways of being that were wired into his early consciousness. When his counselor gave Ben some insightful tools, he was able to identify and avoid those sorts of attachments for the first time in his life.
However, Ben soon found himself faced with the opposite problem. Because he was suspicious of the emotional intuitions that had led him astray for so long, he found that he could only think himself into relationships. Trying to navigate romantic attachments based purely on whether a relationship “makes sense” is also an unreliable guide. We can only exercise genuine discernment in our sexual and relational lives when we have both feeling/intuition and thinking/reflection working together in a dynamic balance. It is only the “thinking heart” that can lead us into healthy relationships. It is not enough just to engage both of these parts to make good decisions in our relationships. As Ben’s experience shows, each part needs to be healed and restored. We cannot think ourselves into a sort of redeemed intuition. This is the work of the Spirit, with a little help from our friends.
Joy Never Ceasing
Joy is a concept that is woven throughout Scripture from beginning to end. The prophet Nehemiah proclaims, “The joy of the LORD is your strength!”29 The psalmist witnesses that “when anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought me joy.”30 Sadly, joy has become a biblical cliché that seems to have no real meaning or significance within our culture. Yet, crucially, joy is the foundation for Christian desire and relationships.
Neurobiologists have shown that while most brain development stops sometime in childhood, the brain’s “joy center”—located and observable in the right orbital prefrontal cortex—is the only part of the brain that never loses its capacity to grow.31 Although we are born as bundles of potential, our interactions in early childhood lay the path for our future relationships, shaping our capacity as desiring beings for good or ill. As a parent—particularly a mother—tunes in to her infant, the baby mirrors the parent’s responses. In this way, the brain begins the complex process of being wired for the back-and-forth communication of human relationships. These positive early interactions create a “joy reservoir” or “joy strength” that acts as the command-and-control center of the entire emotional system. As Dr. James Friesen and his colleagues explain:
When the joy center has been sufficiently developed, it regulates emotions, pain control and immunity centers; it guides us to act like ourselves; it releases neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin; and it is the only part of the brain that overrides the main drive centers—food and sexual impulses, terror and rage.32
They suggest that without sufficient “joy strength” we spend the rest of our lives trying to fill the deficit. Sadly, researchers estimate that around 35 percent of children fail to make secure attachments, creating damaging and sometimes devastating consequences for their future relational lives.33 Yet the glory of God’s design is that he has wired our brains for relational connection, and he has wired them for healing.
When Amelie was first married, she thought that her struggles in life had come to an end. Family life had been difficult growing up as she struggled to connect with her emotionally distant father while needing to care for her emotionally dependent mother. But now she was turning over a new page, having married a great guy from a stable, loving family. It didn’t take long, though, for the past to catch up with her. In her first year of marriage, a colleague started paying her a lot of attention. He was an older man, old enough to be her father. Rather than being put off by his advances, Amelie was alarmed to find that they triggered an inner craving she found difficult to resist. The more attention he gave her, the more she wanted. She knew that this developing relationship was inappropriate, but the attention was like a drug she couldn’t resist. Fearing that the unhealthy emotional attachment might lead to a sexual relationship, she decided to tell her husband. Reflecting on that experience, she says:
Telling my husband was terrifying because I didn’t know if he would understand how out of control I felt. How could I be so convicted that the relationship was wrong, and yet have such an intense craving for it? But telling him was the best thing I did. It broke through the shame I was feeling and allowed me to seek help. I thought it was going to break us apart but in the end it made our marriage stronger.
Amelie’s husband was able to see that this older man was tapping into her unmet needs for a loving and attentive father. Rather than allowing this experience to destroy their relationship, this insight allowed them to address the issue and become closer.
Amelie’s story highlights the extent to which our deepest desires, those foundational longings that we don’t choose for ourselves, are shaped in our early lives. The ability to experience healthy desire and to move beyond ourselves requires the formation of a resilient self-identity. Indeed, we cannot love others, much less God, when there is no self to do the loving. Healthy relationships require interdependence. This involves two independent people becoming bonded together through the mutual giving and receiving of time, affection, resources, kindness, and trust.
We cannot move successfully toward the independence necessary for entering a healthy, intimate relationship until we have properly experienced dependence during our earliest formation. At the heart of compulsive modes of behavior—sexual addiction, masturbation, eating disorders, overspending, alcoholism, and workaholism—lies a deep desire to fill the vacuum caused by a lack of healthy dependence and attachment as a child. Until the need to be cared for while we are totally dependent is met, we will continually seek to have those needs met elsewhere. Sadly, the unattached self tends to enter into relationships that are marked by fear, control, and self-protection. This foundational need to be cared for is an urge that seeks satisfaction, for better or worse. It’s a quest that pastors and leaders need to attend to if they are to lead people into the fullness of the gospel.
Building Communities of Joy
The need to be cared for creates an important formational imperative for parents and families: to invest in building a child’s identity at the beginning of his or her life. Yet the joy center’s capacity to keep developing throughout life also presents a strategic opportunity for the church. If “joy strength” is developed through the constructive back-and-forth of warm and supportive relationships, then building communities of joy and friendship is a critical pastoral task for Christian leaders. Peer-group ministries, for instance, are places where faith and identity can be placed on a firm foundation.
Jesus’s words in John 15:9–11 affirm the importance of this pastoral priority: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” This may sound like strangely legalistic language, but in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus sums up the Mosaic law as love of God and love of neighbor. We will find divine joy, then, in relationship. Belonging within a community of friendship is an important foundation for the formation of Christian identity. Only when we belong can we experience relational joy and the healing it brings. This is also the path to maturity, as we develop a secure identity that is able to progressively focus outward toward others, away from the suffocating focus on self.
Traveling without a Map
Our essential nature as desiring beings has important implications for our approach to discipleship in the area of sexuality and relationships. Because distorted desires can lead to the most destructive human tendencies, we need to redeem these desires and restore them to their God-given purposes. Our affections, for instance, draw us into relationship with others and should play an important role in discerning which romantic relationships to pursue. Although insufficient by itself, romantic attraction plays a more sophisticated role in relational discernment than we often acknowledge.
Like conversion to faith, passionate attraction to someone else provides an important genesis for our story together. When we hit the inevitable storms and deserts of life, remembering our “first love” reorients us with a foundational memory of how we got here and why we should keep going. The Song of Songs has traditionally been read by Israel and the church to have a double meaning, expressing and celebrating both the intimacy of human lovers and God’s desire for and commitment to his people. Our relationships should also have a double orientation, characterized both by eros (desirous longing) and by agape (self-giving sacrificial love for the other).
Before meeting my wife, Esther, I struggled to imagine ever meeting someone whom I would be willing to commit to for the rest of my life. In hindsight, I had some issues centered around being too independent, but at that time, every woman I knew seemed to have more “cons” than “pros.” Subconsciously, I had a long list of prerequisites, and no one could check all the boxes. Yet when I met Esther, she didn’t so much check my boxes as dissolve my list. Although much about her character, personality, and gifts remained hidden for years, I instantly fell for her. Perhaps my emotional intuitions perceived the deeper levels of who she was and why I was attracted to her before the rest of me could catch up.
Of course, this attraction did not make our relationship simple. Nor is there any normative formula for how a relationship should unfold. Part of the deep mystery of romantic love is that it has an infinite array of permutations—each couple’s story will be different. Yet with Esther, I did experience something of the mystery of attraction as a sophisticated intuitive guide. This force was strong enough to break through the thick wall I had constructed between me and any “other.” On reflection, my intuitive reasoning, or thinking heart, was doing its job, and it played an important role in breaking through the wall of self-protection I had built through rational thinking (my checklist). Romantic love has enough explosive power to blow a hole in the barriers we erect around ourselves. Attraction can sum up a whole range of intuitive assessments that we are unable to articulate or rationalize at the time. Although the first years of our marriage were rocky, to say the least, the foundational memory of falling in love provided an important basis on which we sustained our commitment to work things out in those complex early years.
The Heart’s Physician: Engaging the Spirit in Christian Formation
An important task within Christian formation is affirming and pursuing the Spirit’s role in reconfiguring our loves. It is only through this spiritual-moral healing that we can live as new creations.34 Gordon Fee describes how Paul views the Spirit’s work of transformation in the believer. For the apostle, the experienced presence of the Spirit is the key to personal spirituality, leading the believer into the practical ethical life as expressed in the community of faith.35 According to Fee, Paul’s basic ethical imperative—from which all others flowed—is to “walk in/by the Spirit,” mainly evidenced in love as the first fruit of the Spirit.36 Indeed, the other fruits or behaviors Paul describes are examples of love, or koinonia, within the faith community.
For Paul, the Spirit should be a dynamically experienced reality for both the individual and the community.37 The Spirit’s progressive transformation of each person is not an ideal but an actualized reality, so that Paul believes Christians will not experience the ongoing dominance of the “flesh,” or human sinfulness, in their struggle.38
In the Greek and Hellenistic Jewish thinking of Paul’s day, the key concern was to control the “passions,” or lustful desires, through self-discipline.39 The Stoics, for instance, sought to master themselves by rejecting all forms of passion or desire. This one-sided approach represents a model of formation by amputation, and it has been a persistent temptation within Christian discipleship. Such legalistic self-discipline offers a measure of control and security but ultimately is ineffective; it actually does violence to our fundamental identity and Godlikeness. Although controlling the passions is also important for Paul, he locates the solution in the Spirit’s power to restore our desires rather than extinguish them. Paul believes that “walking in the Spirit” is the key to healing our desires, which then allows us to reorient our lives and choices within the framework of the gospel. Fee challenges Christian leaders to resist the temptation to reshape Paul in our own image on the basis of a lesser experience or expectation of the Spirit’s presence and work in our lives and communities.
Finally, Paul sets out the various ad hoc lists of the fruits of the Spirit not as systematic moral rules but as examples of “Spirit-living.”40 In Paul’s approach, the Spirit is both the existential and the ethical heart of the Christian life. When we relegate the Spirit to a background figure in our lives and churches, we weaken our ability to form disciples in Christ, for it is only the Spirit who can do that. Indeed, attempting to shape Christian sexual practices only through a regime of rules and disciplines tempts us to make the same mistake as those in Galatia, who sought to return to the self-disciplined life “according to the flesh.” This is the sort of self-help religion that Paul warns against, for it leads to the very behavior it seeks to avoid.41 For the apostle, the Spirit is the beating heart of Christ’s body, the church—the only power that can restore, heal, and remake each limb for its distinctive role within the body.
Concluding Thoughts: Shooting for the Heart
The goal of Christian formation is to form disciples within the rhythms of divine desire. This is essential to both discipleship and healthy relationships because we cannot love others well until we have experienced God’s love within the deepest parts of ourselves. This is what Bernard was driving at with his progressive journey of Christian desire. First, we must be taught to love by experiencing God’s love. As we travel this journey into divine desire, we are freed to become genuine lovers, like Jesus, rather than just consumers of love.
Within this model there is an important caution. Augustine reminds us that the healing of our affections is progressive, requiring disciplined training within the Christian life. We need to acknowledge and resist the way that modern romanticism has deeply shaped our commitment to both personal independence and sexual gratification as our culture’s highest priorities. If we fail to resist these cultural impulses, we are likely to accommodate them into our vision of life and our approach to discipleship. Although we should affirm the wonder and mystery of sexual intimacy and romantic attraction as God’s good creations, we need to set these aesthetic enjoyments within the context of the Christian virtues of fidelity, self-sacrifice, and patience in suffering.
Bringing this together, our pastoral approach should be double-edged, seeking to challenge our culture’s worship of sexual desire and personal fulfillment while offering a different vision of human flourishing. Christian formation involves both resistance and redirection. But it is the redirection of our desires that enables our resistance of cultural idolatries. Failure to attend to the dynamics of our desires leads to inevitable self-deception regarding the “freedom” of our actions. Especially within our sexual lives, our hearts must be truly captivated by the goodness of the Christian vision of life, so that our whole self is drawn toward it, or our commitment to live in tune with it will be brittle.
Focusing on the human heart as the key to Christian discipleship might sound like an ambiguous or weak affair, somehow diluting the hard realities of the gospel. But this task is the core of the gospel. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says, “God’s covenant is the struggle between His love and sinful man.”42 The heart is where we encounter the most resistance to Christ’s lordship over our lives. It is the heart more than the mind that clings to idols and false loves. The mind can be reeducated with good teaching and consistent preaching, but the heart stubbornly and secretly chooses its own way. Only when we get to this essential part of the self, its command-and-control center, can Christian formation push down deep roots.
We need to be clear that the Christian journey of desire will not be a smooth or easily traveled road. It is one to be walked with hope, courage, and perseverance, always tethered to the unshakeable grace of God. C. S. Lewis explains that the Christian journey of desire is unmistakably one of hard sacrifice of our cherished fantasies, as well as ultimate satisfaction in the freedom of becoming our true selves. As he puts it, “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”43 Sacrifice and satisfaction, then, are the two feet that carry us on the long walk to freedom.
1. Prov. 4:23.
2. “Does Sex Addiction Exist?,” BBC Magazine, April 30, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7371171.stm.
3. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 77.
4. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.
5. This is described as Augustine’s “Platonic” or “intellectual” conversion in book 7. His subsequent “moral” conversion is described in book 8. The critical moment in this journey was when he felt compelled to read Rom. 13:13–14 and, freed from self-deception, was convicted of the depth of his own sinfulness. As he recalls, “all the shadows of doubt were dispelled” at this moment (8.16).
6. Augustine, Confessions 8.7. See also Bradley P. Holt, Thirsty for God: A Brief History of Christian Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 71.
7. Augustine, Confessions 4.11; 5.1; 6.6.
8. Holt, Thirsty for God, 72.
9. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.
10. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 51.
11. Augustine, “Sermon on 1 John,” quoted in David Burrell, “Can We Be Free without a Creator?,” in God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas, ed. L. Gregory Jones, Reinhard Hütter, and C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005), 48.
12. Ibid.
13. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 26.
14. James M. Houston, The Heart’s Desire: Satisfying the Hunger of the Soul (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2001), 202.
15. Ibid.
16. John MacMurray, Reason and Emotion (London: Faber & Faber, 1942), 123.
17. Holt, Thirsty for God, 86.
18. Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Loving God,” in Selected Works, 173–206. Bernard thought that the experience of this fourth and final degree of love was rare in this life but would be our constant experience in the New Jerusalem.
19. See F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1977).
20. Eph. 4:17–24 (emphasis added).
21. F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 355.
22. Eph. 5:3.
23. Houston, Heart’s Desire, 112–13.
24. Ibid.
25. Eph. 1:18.
26. Katelyn Beaty, “Same-Sex Marriage and the Single Christian: How Marriage-Happy Churches Are Unwittingly Fueling Same-Sex Coupling—and Leaving Singles Like Me in the Dust,” Christianity Today, July 1, 2013, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/july-web-only/same-sex-marriage-and-single-christian.html.
27. It is important to note that creation epics in the ancient Near East were theological, anthropological, and polemical. That is, rather than being “eyewitness” accounts of the process of creation, they were designed primarily to express a vision of the nature of God and his creation. This vision was expressed over against rival creation epics. In this sense, Genesis says important and enduring things about who we are and the nature of God’s intended design, thereby providing the cornerstone for Christian anthropology. This explains why Jesus and the New Testament writers draw so heavily on Genesis 2 as a framing paradigm for Christian sexuality. Paul’s teaching in Romans 1 clarifies in big-picture terms that when we trade the truth about God for a lie, our culture becomes morally and sexually confused. It is ironic that some interpreters have chosen to quarantine Paul’s views to his particular cultural context at just the time that his teaching is most relevant to ours.
28. Houston, Heart’s Desire, 215. These characteristics closely resemble the three aspects of romantic love identified by Helen Fisher. See Fisher, “Why We Love, Why We Cheat.”
29. Neh. 8:10.
30. Ps. 94:19.
31. James G. Friesen et al., The Life Model: Living from the Heart Jesus Gave You; The Essentials of Christian Living (Pasadena, CA: Shepherd’s House, 1999), 16.
32. Ibid., 12.
33. Marinus van IJzendoorn, “Adult Attachment Representations, Parental Responsiveness, and Infant Attachment: A Meta-Analysis on the Predictive Validity of the Adult Attachment Interview,” Psychology Bulletin 117, no. 3 (1995): 387–403.
34. 2 Cor. 5:17.
35. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence, 871.
36. Ibid., 879. See Gal. 5:22.
37. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence, 880.
38. Ibid.
39. Thompson, Pastoral Ministry according to Paul, 75.
40. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence, 882.
41. Gal. 5:16–24.
42. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone: The Way of Revelation (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968), 58.
43. C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis (Fort Washington, PA: Mariner Books, 2003), 477.