Earlier this year, my therapist lent me a copy of Every Man’s Battle by Steve Arterburn, Fred Stoeker and Mike Yorkey. At first, I thought that this was simply some good advice, albeit set within some dodgy theology of rather Puritanical churchmanship. Later, however, I came to see this book as quite dangerous, and one a therapist ought to think at least twice before recommending to any patient.
I’ll start with the good stuff. This book is aimed at men who want to take seriously biblical (and traditional Christian) teaching on chastity, but who are struggling with inappropriate sexual feelings. It acknowledges that people who want to take chastity seriously may be in a minority, even within churches – I found particular resonance in an anecdote (p.54) of a Christian teenager who found it easier with non-Christian friends, who were prepared to accept that she might want to abstain for religious reasons, than with Christian friends who mocked her (to them) over-zealous attitude – and provides helpful advice about approaching the problem, starting with training oneself not to look at sexual images, or people who might stimulate sexual thoughts (except one’s wife); and going on to Orwellian “crimestop” techniques of diverting one’s thoughts when tempted to indulge in fantasies.
Unfortunately, that last paragraph encapsulates almost all that is good about the book. The rest of this review, I’m afraid, will deconstruct the book, going from things I merely disagree with, through things that I think are dodgy or blatantly bad exegesis, to advice in the book that I consider dangerous.
Interpreting Scripture: Principles
Whenever I encounter anyone – speaker, author, or whoever – who presents their interpretation of scripture as “this is how God thinks”, it rings theological alarm bells for me. However, I acknowledge that this is how reading the Bible works for many Christians, and this is not per se a reason to condemn the book. Indeed, it can be hard to separate from the general Puritanical background. The authors are very keen to take any piece of teaching, especially in the New Testament, and treat it as a rule that we are required to follow. Since this is a book on sexual morality, we cannot tell whether they do this in all areas of moral teaching, just a few, or just sexual morality; and a full answer would be different in each of these cases. We can, however, draw out a few points.
Starting not with the book under review but with the Bible, Romans 14 gives some valuable teaching on how to solve moral dilemmas. (As an aside, I frequently observe people arguing over moral questions, each side citing bible verses to back up their position, but neither side looking at this chapter, which actually provides teaching on how to answer such questions in general.) Here, Paul, by means of two examples – vegetarianism and Sabbath observance – explores how to resolve the issue when two people have different opinions. In both cases, those whose response to God’s Grace is to follow rules should not judge those who feel free of the rules, while those who feel that Grace has freed them from the need for rules should not look down on “weaker” Christians who do feel moved to follow the rules.
For Arterburn and Stoeker, however, freedom from rules is not an option. The rules have biblical authority; this should be enough! Perfection, not mere excellence (pp.49–50), is the standard not merely to which we aspire, but to which we must hold ourselves. At best, this gives the impression that the Grace we receive from God is merely the strength to follow the rules (freedom not from sin, but merely from the burden of past sin); at worst, that salvation is not by Grace alone but by Grace and works. (A few references to salvation, such as that on page 72, don’t really make up for this.)
On the question of whether the authors apply this to all morality, some areas of morality or only to sexual morality, the relationship between sexuality and morality – in both Christian and secular thinking, and in other religions as well – would be a good subject for a major study. It would cover questions like why a sex scandal is (or used to be) the most effective way of getting rid of a government minister (or even a king, in the case of Edward VIII), and why men can regard themselves as good Christians even as they employ prostitutes.
Interpreting Scripture: Passages
A tendency to turn everything in scripture into rules may be merely a point of churchmanship; but sometimes the way the authors do this, and the passages they pick, show up their interpretation as dodgy in itself. Two specific Bible passages stand out for me in this respect.
The first is a classic: such a well-known passage, and so easy to misinterpret, that any Christian writer who doesn’t spot the error is either being absurdly careless, or hasn’t been properly taught. The passage is Matthew 5:27–28: “‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’”
The obvious pitfall is to interpret this as “thinking about it is the same as doing it”, especially in the light of the parallel passage on anger, Matt. 5:21–22. I have heard this from Christians at house groups and similar gatherings, and it is indeed the line taken by Arterburn and Stoeker (p.156). But a moment’s thought shows that this is not valid. If thinking about hurting someone is the same (to God) as actually hurting that person, then it must mean that God does not care whether you actually hurt anyone. Some Christians may believe in a God who does not care about people, only about obedience, but I do not! A better interpretation is that such thoughts are just as much of a sin as the actions, not that they are the same as the actions.
The second passage was rather less familiar (to me at least): Ezekiel 23. Here Ezekiel is telling a parable of two Hebrew girls who go to Egypt to work as prostitutes, and come to a sticky end as a result. The prophet states that they represent Jerusalem and Samaria, the capital cities of the two Hebrew kingdoms. It seems (Ezekiel is far from clear about this!) that these two nations, or their capitals, have been encouraging other peoples and faiths to settle and take root in the Israelite territories.
Arterburn and Stoeker, however, turn the parable backwards, and use it to assert that God condemns the behaviour of the girls; not just that they prostituted themselves, but specifically that their activities as prostitutes included letting customers fondle their breasts (vv. 3, 21). This involves two errors. One is to take a small part – “petting” – out of context, as if it stands alone rather than (as here) a euphemism for other activities; but far worse is the inversion of the parable.
The way a parable works is that a story is used to liken something unknown (usually about God) to something known (in the world); in this case, the unspecified, but presumably known to Ezekiel’s audience, behaviour of the two nations is likened to prostitution. The purpose of the parable, however is to present the unknown, in this case God's view of the people's behaviour, by comparing that behaviour to prostitution, rather than to tell us about prostitution. This says nothing about what God thinks of prostitution; the parable works as long as there is a cultural aversion to prostitution (the known) to which God’s disapproval of things going on in the capital (the unknown) can be linked. It is bad exegesis to deduce that God has an aversion to prostitution; worse to pick one probably euphemistic detail (petting) and single out the passage as evidence (which even the authors admit is hard to find elsewhere in the Bible) that God disapproves of this in itself.
Why is this important? Why have I gone on about it for three whole paragraphs? Parables are important in the Bible, especially in the teachings of Jesus. Not only does this way of reading parables allow a commentator to attach divine authority where the parable does not put it, it can also make parables harder to understand. And with Jesus’s teaching, the parables are hard enough to understand even without such red herrings! The parable of the dishonest manager in Luke 16, for example, is enigmatic, and even seems to exhort the hearer to make friends by means of dishonesty (verse 9). Nothing can be gained in interpreting this parable if we also bring to it the idea that the example Jesus uses (a manager about to be fired, dishonestly using company money to create a community of people who owe him favours) is in itself something that God approves of, as well as an analogy for the actual message (and even without this there is so much uncertainty over the actual message that I shall not attempt an explanation here!).
Interpreting Scripture: Eisegesis
Eisegesis is the practice of reading meaning into rather than out of scripture. It is sometimes deprecated in bible courses, but it does actually have its place: allegorical readings and reader-centred approaches both use it to good effect. However, one caveat is important: while a meaning that one brings to scripture can be helpful in one’s own journey of faith, it cannot be authoritative – not over the reader, still less over those to whom the reader expounds scripture.
To give an example from my own faith journey, in my teens and my twenties, I used to justify my refusal to drink alcohol by reference to the Last Supper: Jesus said, “Do this as often as you drink it” (1 Corinthians 11:25), so whenever we drink alcohol it must be at a celebration of the Eucharist. Later I was confident enough that I felt no need to justify my abstinence, but either way, I knew (I hope) that this interpretation was something I brought to the text, not something that was inherent in it, and that I was free to interpret it differently and (most importantly) had no right to impose my reading on others.
The most blatant piece of eisegesis that I encountered in Every Man’s Battle comes on page 77. Here, the authors are talking about cultural ideas of manhood, or of manliness. And then they drop their bombshell: God’s only definition (another example of their attaching God’s name to their own interpretation of Scripture!) of manhood is “hearing his word and doing it” (their emphasis). Well, I can see where this comes from (Matthew 7:24 and James 1:22–25, for example), but not how it becomes a definition of manhood! This is pure eisegesis – an idea that the authors have brought to the Bible – but they are claiming it as “God’s definition”. (Indeed, in Matthew 7, both the wise and foolish characters in Jesus’s parable are described as ἀνήρ, an adult male, so it is not even another instance of reading a parable backwards.) And this is before we even start on the status of an obedient woman – if obedience defines manliness, is she being unfeminine?
General Difficulties
Moving on from the dodgy theology, what I found hardest was cultural assumptions. Some were simply differences that I could pass over; others made the text harder to understand, or broke the chain of the authors’ logic.
The big cultural assumption is that readers have grown up within a culture typical of the USA, possibly even the southern USA. Not quite secular American, for Christianity is still a much bigger part of culture in the USA than it is in Britain; but readers are expected to be normal American men, probably in their thirties or forties, married and with children. A reader who did not grow up in US culture, or who was a misfit in the culture where they did grow up (and I am in both categories!) can feel a bit at sea.
One example is in the discussion of manliness mentioned in the last section. As an example of a definition of manliness we must discard, the authors cite an (imaginary) man who needs to use two blades when shaving, one for each side of his face; and probably needs to do this more than once a day. “Those of us who are ‘smooth men’ … hold this tough guy in awe,” they say. Do we? As someone whose (electric) razor goes blunt in rather less than half the time predicted by the manufacturers, I know what a trial this man faces and feel rather sorry for him! Maybe I am not a “smooth man”, but I cannot imagine feeling awe for such a person.
These cultural assumptions colour the authors’ advice on how to avoid temptation. Not only do they assume that I have grown up discovering – and gratifying – my sexual desires in much the same way as an average American, they seem to give no thought to the possibility that I might be reading their book because my sexual desires are not typical, rather than because they are.
The assumption that the reader is married is also apparent in poor editing. On page 27, the authors list ten questions to determine whether you are close to sexual addiction; several of the questions ask about “other women” before the reader’s wife is even mentioned – she is merely assumed to be present as a referent for “other”.
(Further poor editing in this section: one list, from which if you display “any” behaviour you are close to sexual addiction, is followed by another, from which you need to display all the behaviours to be actually addicted. That, if taken literally, means that almost everybody is close to sexual addiction, almost nobody either free of it or actually addicted. “Close to” seems to have been redefined!)
Now, the authors do admit that they are writing primarily for married men, but say that their advice is for single men as well. This is fair enough, though it does not excuse sloppy editing; it is not valid, however, when an argument predicated on the fact that one is married is followed by advice for single men that boils down to “all the same rules plus some extras” (p.181). Maybe the advice is better tailored to single men in the companion volume, Every Young Man’s Battle. If so, the presumption that a single man is young shows how closely they expect readers to conform to cultural norms!
Finally, the Dangerous Bit
Cultural assumptions belong firmly in the category of mere disagreement. The last piece of advice, however, does not. This is that if you are a single man, and a single woman friend marries someone else, you should drop the friendship (p.181). My wife, when I told her of this, said that anyone who required their spouse to drop single friendships (as this hypothetical woman is expected to do) would be an abusive partner. I am not so sure, but I certainly see it as a bad sign, a sign that the relationship could easily lead to abuse. And yet readers are enjoined not only to condone such behaviour but to expect it!
This is only one example, but it shows that the attitude behind much of the thinking in this book is one that normalises abusive behaviour. A book that expresses such views can hardly be safe for a therapist to recommend to people who have many of the difficulties the book purports to address.
(All
bible quotations are from the English Standard Version, ©2001
by Crossway Bibles.)
No comments:
Post a Comment