Abstract:
In the rapidly evolving cultural landscape that has followed on the heels of the sexual revolution, Protestants have struggled to sufficiently comprehend and respond to the subversion of gender and sexual norms in the West. Protestants have largely responded in the form of a textual apologetic grounded in biblical theology. The efficacy of this approach has been undermined by the departure of several mainline denominations from historic doctrinal commitments on sexuality, while offering alternative hermeneutical proposals that challenge traditional interpretations of the critical proof texts. Reflecting on the current moment, Carl Trueman opines: “Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 405). The Reformed suspicion of natural theology and natural law looms especially large when the NT authors appear to ground their sexual ethic in part in the natural order itself (Rom 1:18–31).
There is a growing resurgence within Protestant scholarship to retrieve the tradition of classical theology (see esp. Craig Carter, James Dolezal, John Fesko, Fred Sanders, Scott Swain, etc.), and with it, natural theology and natural law (see esp. Michael Sudduth, David VanDrunnen, etc.). However, these efforts have largely focused on the applications of natural theology to theology proper, leaving the wider anthropological implications unexplored. This is consistent with the overarching project of natural theology, but while the aim of natural theology is the knowledge of God, this natural knowledge of God is attained in part through the observations of creatures reflecting on the natural world. Numerous representative principles of classical natural theology, such as act and potency, a participatory metaphysic, the essence/existence distinction, the refutation of Platonic dualism, the relationship of form and matter, the connection between final causality and natural law, etc., have profound but largely unconsidered relevance to the anthropological questions of sex, gender and embodiment contested today. This paper seeks to expose that lacuna by demonstrating the relevance of classical natural theology to a theology of human embodiment and sexuality. This retrieval of natural theology in service to biblical theology is all the more necessary when one considers that the warrant of the Apostle Paul’s sexual ethic stands on the foundation of what uses of the body are “contrary to nature” (Rom 1:26). This paper will argue the Reformed suspicion of classical natural theology is unjustified and largely ahistorical, and that a retrieval of the insights of natural theology with specific application to sexuality/embodiment are long overdue in complementing the more developed biblical theology of sex.
Thesis
In service to biblical theology, Protestants need to retrieve a natural theology of embodiment and sexuality.