“Celibacy is a hard choice, and if churches are not willing to hold it up as an honorable pursuit and support it with practices of friendship and hospitality, I’m not sure it will seem viable to many sexual minorities. […] The congregations that give me hope are ones where I see married people and single people, older people and younger people, all sharing meals and ministries and small groups together.”

— Wesley Hill, quoted in Hope for the Gay Undergrad by Allison J. Althoff, Christianity Today (via thatquestion)

“My own theology of sin and grace, namely [is] that ‘sins’ are personal choices made in the vortex of ‘fallenness.’ Sins are often the way we express grief and lostness, not just high-handed rebellion and arrogance. Contra Pelagius, Augustine’s opponent, who pictured humans as standing, after each act of their wills, in exactly the same place of moral neutrality, Augustine asserted that we’re in bondage, not free at every moment to choose the good. We’re mortally wounded by Adam’s sin, and therefore we ought to view each of our own sins and the sins of others not only as blameworthy acts but also, and importantly, as what we’ll all inevitably keep on doing without the intervention of divine grace — as expressions of the Pauline cry, ‘Wretched man that I am! who will deliver me from this body of death?’”

— Wesley Hill, On (mis)paraphrasing Augustine, writing in the dust (via wesleyhill)

“[Dietrich] Bonhoeffer suggests… that if we’re really to preach about the sin of humanity, we have to avoid yoking that preaching too closely to the feelings of guilt that may or may not be a feature of our hearers’ experience. Regardless of what a person may feel, Bonhoeffer implies, the gospel truly addresses them and lays claim to their lives. The truths of sin and redemption aren’t dependent on the rising and falling of human emotional states. And to dismantle a faulty view of the importance of those emotional states isn’t equivalent to a wholesale revision of Christian teaching on sin and redemption.

[…]

[… I]n our rush to defend our understanding of sin and human flourishing, we too easily assume that the same emotions must be the universal human result of certain behavioral choices… .

I submit that Bonhoeffer may provide us with a way out of this conundrum. Avoiding what he calls ‘an attack on the adulthood of the world,’ we may realize that it isn’t part of our Christian calling to first expose (or conjure) guilty feelings before we commend, say, a traditional Christian vision of marriage. Rather, we can simply acknowledge that human emotions are unpredictable; ‘peace’ and ‘fulfillment’ may indeed be the outcome of practices and behaviors that, from a Christian vantage point, we must deem sinful. But no matter. The gospel lays claim to the whole human being in the midst of that ‘peace.’ Here in Advent, we remember the One who told us he did not come to bring peace (Matt. 10:34). He came to demand our all—to ask for our death and our life. No matter how robust our consciences may be, he came to save us all.”

— Wesley Hill, Bonhoeffer’s Argument Against Religious Blackmail, First Things (via wesleyhill)

(via wesleyhill)

“The doctrine of the Trinity is the church’s elaborate (and necessary!) way to say something very simple, namely, that the God we meet in Jesus’ life and death and the Spirit’s descent is God as God is in himself. There’s no ogre hidden somewhere in eternity or in heaven waiting to reveal Himself at the last minute and prove that all that grace and mercy business was actually a cover for something much more sinister. No! The Trinity says, God who is he for us is the same as God in and of himself. What you see is what you get. The theologian T. F. Torrance tells about an incident that happened in 1944 after an assault on San Martino-Sogliano. Torrance was serving as a stretcher bearer in the conflict, and he encountered a dying soldier, 20 years old, named Private Philips. The soldier was near the end, laid out on the ground, and eager for some spiritual comfort as he passed away. Torrance leaned down, and Philips said, ‘Padre, is God really like Jesus?’ And Torrance said without hesitation, ‘Yes, God is like Jesus.’ Or as Michael Ramsey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury said, ‘God is Christlike, and in Him is no unChristlikness at all.’ That’s what the doctrine of the Trinity means. If you see Jesus in the Gospels healing the sick, proclaiming the kingdom, dying on the cross, and you think, ‘I want a God who’s like that,’ then the doctrine of the Trinity says to you, ‘Well, you can have one, because that Jesus is God.’”

— Wesley Hill, Five Questions For: Wesley Hill, On The Story-Shaped Life (Part 2) (interview by S.D. Smith)

“Maybe there are a few ultra-legalists out there who would be happy with a bare, context-less command. But for me, thinking about the idea of a ‘story-shaped life,’ I can’t be satisfied anymore unless I try to situate and contextualize what I believe God is asking of me within the big framework of God’s story of redemption in Jesus. So, to take a mundane example, if God says, ‘Don’t steal,’ what’s the big picture — what’s the Story — that makes that command make sense? Well, God has come to us in his Son. He was born in a stable for us, he died on the cross to release us from the powers that enslave us, he was raised from the dead on the third day, and after he ascended into heaven, he poured his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit he gave to us. So, if he has done all that, he’ll withhold nothing else from us (Romans 8:32). He’s totally for us. We have everything we need. ‘And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you [God]. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever’ (Psalm 73:26). So, in the light of all that grace and provision, the command not to steal suddenly looks very different.

It’s not an arbitrary rule designed to ruin my life. It’s basically God saying, ‘You don’t need anything other than the great grace I’ve given you in the gospel. So don’t take anything that’s not yours. Don’t rob others. You don’t need to. I’m your supply. I’m your portion forever. Trust me.’”

— Wesley Hill, Five Questions For: Wesley Hill, On The Story-Shaped Life (Part 1) (interview by S.D. Smith)

“[S]ometimes, when arguments have done all they can do, it takes the glory and loveliness of a Christian’s life to persuade us to embrace the faith for ourselves.

I know when I think about why I continue to believe, I realize my faith is inseparable from the hospitality and friendship of the Christians I know. Names come to mind — Tom, Julie, Dick, Mardi, Denis, Margie, Ross, Barbie, and many others — names of friends whose lives have answered my question, ‘If I were to go on embracing the Christian gospel, what kind of life would result? Would it be a beautiful life? Could it be a life that inspires and blesses and enriches the world?’ I think that’s one of the main questions we should be asking when we talk about why we or someone else should or could believe the Christian story. It shouldn’t be a cold, clinical discussion of ‘evidence’ — as important as those discussions may be in their own time and place. Rather, it should be a self-involving conversation about the shape of the lives we’re living and what those lives might look like if we believed a different story.”

— Wesley Hill, Five Questions For: Wesley Hill, On The Story-Shaped Life (Part 1) (interview by S.D. Smith)

“Martin Luther famously distinguished between a ‘theology of glory’ and a ‘theology of the cross.’ In the former you find yourself substituting a crown of thorns and a body of nailed flesh for a more palatable scene. But with a ‘theologia crucis,’ you can call a spade a spade. You can look grief and loss in the face and identify them for what they are. There’s room… for rage and sobbing and protest and fear and horror.

The great English-American poet W. H. Auden once heard a lecture in which, as Edward Mendelson recounts the scene, the speaker said that, ‘Jesus and Buddha were the same in effect: they were both attacked by spears, but in the Buddha’s case, the spears turned into flowers.’ Auden bristled at this, shouting from the back of the lecture hall, ‘ON GOOD FRIDAY THE SPEARS WERE REAL.’

If those spears were real, we can admit the spears we’ve felt are real, too. There’s no need to pretend we’re smelling roses when all we feel is metal piercing skin. Good Friday enables us to name the pain and face it.”

— Wesley Hill, Anger room

“The Christian story proclaims that all the demands of Scripture are ultimately summons, calls, invitations—beckoning us to experience true, beautiful, and good humanness.

C. S. Lewis once faced the question: Won’t pursuing Christian holiness make me naive, less worldly-wise, less experienced? If I follow the dictates of the gospel, I’ll become a sheltered, backwoods bumpkin, unaware of and irrelevant to real human experience! To this objection, Lewis wrote:

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… . A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in… . Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

[…]

But I’ve also come to see that a bold claim like Lewis’s works only if we accept the New Testament’s teaching that Jesus Christ is the measure of true humanity. ‘Behold the man!’ cried Pilate at Jesus’ trial, speaking better than he knew (John 19:5). As Karl Barth declared, ‘This man is man.’ Woven into the fabric of Christian theology is the insistence that Jesus Christ is the truest, most perfect, most glorious human being who has ever lived—and that those who want to experience true, full, rich humanness must become like him, must pattern their lives after Jesus’ humanity (Romans 8:29; Ephesians 4:20-24; Colossians 3:1-17).

‘Jesus is the model of the fulfilled human being,’ biblical scholar Walter Moberly writes. ‘The Gospels portray a compelling and attractive person, who engages seriously with people and is good company at a party. Yet all the evidence is that he lived as a sexual celibate.’ It may come as a surprise in our age of personal gratification that Jesus never married and never had sex—with a woman or with a man. He never gave in to any lust. Although he experienced every human temptation (Hebrews 4:15), he never sinned sexually. And yet he was the truest, fullest human being who has ever lived. Indeed, precisely because he never sinned, he was truly, fully human. From the Bible’s perspective, sin mars and stains humanity. But Jesus never felt that stain.

Does this mean that everyone who wants to share the true humanity of Jesus must be single and celibate? No. It does, however, shift the terms of our modern thinking about sexuality. It dislodges our assumption that having sex is necessary to be truly, fully alive. If Jesus abstained and if he is the measure of what counts as true humanity, then I may abstain too—and trust that, in so doing, I will not ultimately lose.

[…]

According to the Christian story, true Christlike holiness is the same thing as true humanness.”

— Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality

“For me, viewing Cormon’s Caïn was a reminder that the biblical God—the God of the gospel—is a dangerous God. Cain murders Abel, and God calls him to account: ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ (Genesis 4:9). Although he tries to evade God’s all-seeing gaze, to dodge the implicit accusation, God refuses to let Cain relinquish the dignity he has as a human person made in God’s own image. God takes Cain seriously. He treats his actions as full of import by giving them consequences. He doesn’t merely brush aside his sin; he responds by cursing him for his murderous rage but also by graciously providing for his continued survival (4:10-15). In a word, God threatens Cain’s life—at least the life he knows and loves—with judgment and the possibility of merciful transformation.

Both the Old and New Testaments in the Bible are replete with such stories. Genesis tells of Jacob the patriarch wrestling with a man who turns out to be God’s messenger intent on blessing Jacob—by bruising him. ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me,’ Jacob pants, hip out of joint, clinging to the one who represents the dangerous God he fears and longs for (32:22-32). Similarly, one of Peter’s sermons recorded in the book of Acts climaxes with the affirmation that ‘God … sent [his servant Jesus] to you first, to bless you,’ not in the usual way, to be sure—not by indulging people, like a cosmic Santa Claus—but ‘by turning every one of you from your wickedness’ (3:26).

Sometimes when I ponder again what it means for me and others to live faithfully before God as homosexual Christians, I think of Cormon’s painting and these biblical reminders that the God of the gospel is known by his threat to our going on with ‘business as usual.’ Far from being a tolerant grandfather rocking in his chair somewhere far away in the sky, God most often seems dangerous, demanding, and ruthless as he makes clear that he is taking our homoerotic feelings and actions with the utmost seriousness. Like Cain, we sometimes squirm as we relate to God. We experience him both as an unwanted presence reminding us that our thoughts, emotions, and choices have lasting consequences, as well as a radiant light transforming us gradually, painfully, into the creatures he wants us to be.

British theologian John Webster speaks of ‘the church facing the resistance of the gospel,’ meaning that if the gospel brings comfort, it also necessarily brings affliction. The gospel resists the fallen inclinations of Christian believers. When we engage with God in Christ and take seriously the commands for purity that flow from the gospel, we always find our sinful dreams and desires challenged and confronted. When we homosexual Christians bring our sexuality before God, we begin or continue a long, costly process of having it transformed. From God’s perspective, our homoerotic inclinations are like ‘the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst’ (to borrow Frederick Buechner’s fine phrase). Yet when God begins to try to change the craving and give us the living water that will ultimately quench our thirst, we scream in pain, protesting that we were made for salt. The change hurts.

‘Are homosexuals to be excluded from the community of faith?’ asked one gay Christian in a letter to a friend. ‘Certainly not,’ he concluded. ‘But anyone who joins such a community should know that it is a piece of transformation, of discipline, of learning, and not merely a place to be comforted and indulged.’ Engaging with God and entering the transformative life of the church does not mean we get a kind of ‘free pass,’ an unconditional love that leaves us where we are. Instead, we get a fiercely demanding love, a divine love that will never let us escape from the purifying, renovating, and ultimately healing grip.

And this means that our pain—the pain of having our deeply ingrained inclinations and desires blocked and confronted by God’s demand for purity in the gospel—far from being a sign of our failure to live the life God wants, may actually be the mark of our faithfulness. We groan in frustration because of our fidelity to the gospel’s call. And though we may miss out in the short run on lives of personal fulfillment and sexual satisfaction, in the long run the cruelest thing that God could do would be to leave us alone with our desires, to spare us the affliction of his refining care.

‘Not only does God in Christ take people as they are: He takes them in order to transform them into what He wants them to be,’ writes historian Andrew Walls. In light of this, is it any surprise that we homosexual Christians must experience such a transformation along with the rest of the community of faith?”

— Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality

“When I cannot feel God’s love for me in my struggle, to have a friend grab my shoulder and say, ‘I love you, and I’m in this with you for the long haul’ is, in some ways, an incarnation of God’s love that I would otherwise have trouble resting in.”

— Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality

(via Wesley Hill)

“In 1929 he presented his doctoral thesis, which had as a subject the idea of the end of the world in modern German literature, from Lessing to Ernst Bloch. Judging by his citations, Balthasar continued to regard playwrights, poets and novelists as theological sources as important as the Fathers of [‘or’?] the Schoolmen.”

— Aidan Nichols on the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, describing the kind of theologian I’d like to be, i.e., one who doesn’t think about literature and the arts and then, later, in a separate moment, think about God and Scripture and theology

Wesley Hill has just described in one sentence what i’ve been thinking about, and holding very precious to my heart, for the last four years. ♥