Chapter Seven: Retrieving Singleness in Christian Theology

My upcoming book, The Meaning of Singleness, will be published by InterVarsity Press on May 9, 2023. In the lead up to its release, I’m sharing a short weekly excerpt, chapter by chapter.

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Chapter Seven: Retrieving Singleness in Christian Theology

“Stanley Hauerwas argues that a similar failure has occurred in our theological description and resultant ethical approach to marriage, and particularly the romantic idealization to which Christians have subjected and even subjugated it. In clinging to marital and familial relationships as that which promises “to give our lives, if not purpose, at least an ‘anchor,’”¹ Christians have fashioned them into “the paradigm of love and intimacy in our society.”² However, the weight of such wondrous expectations is a heavy burden to bear, and sadly there “is ample evidence to suggest that such an understanding is disastrous both personally and politically.”³

Hauerwas contends that the contemporary church has also neglected its responsibility to undertake an urgent evaluation of its theological and ethical attitudes toward sex. He argues that the modern Christian approach to sex and sexuality is characterized by either a demystifying realism (i.e., “People, including young people, are going to ‘do it’—so try to keep the damage down”⁴), or a romantic idealization (i.e., the fundamental question about sex is “whether our sexual expressions are or are not expressions of love”⁵). In response to this dichotomy the church has come to celebrate sexuality as the arena of authentic human fulfilment. This is evidenced by the way “Christian ethicists have usually fallen over each other in their attempts to say good things about sex. God created us as sexual beings, they say. Adam needed Eve to be whole, they say.”⁶

Hauerwas argues that this positioning of sex, romance, marriage, and family as the ultimate locales of authentic love, intimacy, idealized personal pleasure, and individual fulfilment is far more at home within contemporary liberalism than an eschatological community defined and compelled by God’s teleological purposes in Jesus Christ. In failing to form a robust account of these institutions aligned with its distinctly eschatological identity and mission, the church has intentionally adopted or unwittingly absorbed secular relational and sexual norms. Too often “the flag of Christian sexual ethics has been a secular ethic baptized by the Christian church in the name of natural law”⁷ as if this makes it distinctly and fundamentally Christian.”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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1. Stanley Hauerwas, “The Radical Hope in the Annunciation: Why Both Single and Married Christians Welcome Children,” in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (London: Duke University Press, 2001), 510.

2. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1981), 159.

3. Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991), 126.

4. Stanley Hauerwas and Allen Verhey, “From Conduct to Character: A Guide to Sexual Adventure,” The Reformed Journal 36, no. 11 (1986): 13.

5. Hauerwas, After Christendom?, 116.

6. Stanley Hauerwas and Allen Verhey, “From Conduct to Character: A Guide to Sexual Adventure,” The Reformed Journal 36, no. 11 (1986): 13.

7. Hauerwas, Community, 177.