Iconoclasm and the Evangelical Preoccupation with Sex

Evangelical Christians (by "Evangelical Christians" I am using the term in the sense that modern demographers use it, not in its more theo-historical usage that describes the evangelical activity of the church catholic) are well known for their strict sexual ethic. In fact, this might be the main thing known about them in the popular imagination. Evangelicals don't have sex before marriage, don't believe in abortion, insist on abstinence only sex-ed, are against gay marriage, and have the highest teen pregnancy rates in America. It is easy to caricature evangelical sexual ethics and too often evangelical institutions get themselves into trouble with the media over their positions on sexual ethical issues (IVP, TWU, ETS, etc.). While it is easy to poke holes in the logic (or lack thereof) of much that passes for evangelical sexuality, I think this is getting the real issue exactly wrong.

The real problem evangelicals have created for themselves is a latent form of gnosticism that is at once negatively defined as iconoclastic and positively defined as foundationalist. The basic error in evangelical anthropology is that they have offered a reductionist account of the gospel, and so are at a loss for what to do with the bodily reality that defines and delimits our existence. By emphasizing biblicism (cf. Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible) and reducing "belief" to an intellectual adherence to merely propositional content, evangelicals lack a properly theological account of what to do with their bodies. On the one hand, the Bible has a lot to say about the proper management of the body, and sexual ethics are definitely within its purview. On the other hand, by reducing the gospel to the intellectual assent of the propositions of the Four Spiritual Laws or some other evangelistic formula, it is unclear how the embodied ethics of the Bible apply to a people who are saved by the intellect alone. This merely propositional account of the gospel then informs the hermeneutic of biblicism which requires a rather stark adherence to the sexual ethic of the Bible, amplified and nuanced by the social anxiety felt in conservative America created by the fast pace of societal change over the last fifty years. The Bible thus becomes a sort of text-book of rules and principles for Christian living that leads the church right back to the basic problem of Israel - nobody can keep the Law in its entirety.


As for the charge of iconoclasm, it is important to note that centuries before the Protestants took up the position of iconoclasm, the church had experienced iconoclasm in its attempt to be missional to Muslim converts. Ikons were banned from the churches in an attempt to include Jews and Muslims, and because of anxiety about "worshiping" a created substance. This error was eventually resolved by an ecumenical council that pointed out that what was at issue was a deep commitment to the Chalcedonian clarification regarding the Incarnation. The significance of the Incarnation is that God has taken up and redeemed and sanctified created matter. Therefore, created matter is sufficient to truly depict Jesus alongside the saints and prophets. Depictions of the Father and Spirit must remain metaphorical and figurative, but Jesus, the Deus-Homo, can be depicted by material means. What the reaffirmation of iconography meant for the church practically was that the body was deeply re-affirmed. Creation has been and is being restored in Jesus, therefore we can affirm the goodness of material reality as both a created and redeemed good. While the Protestants did not take up the position of iconoclasm to deny this theological insight (indeed, the Kuyperian stream of Reformed theology is deeply affirmative of creation), the lack of ikons in Protestant piety has left them open to the body-denying propositional foundationalism and its attendant biblicism I outlined above. This has been especially amplified in evangelical piety where the saving of souls is so important that church architecture, music, and art have all met a grisly demise as angst for damned souls (combined with a capitulation to consumer-capitalism) obscures the good news of an embodied gospel. Kevin Vanhoozer rightly points out that the propositional content of the gospel is insufficiently faithful to the message of the gospel. The transformative announcement that Jesus is Lord has locutionary effects; in other words, it must be bodily performed. Assent to propositions is only part of the gospel which is why baptism and the Apostles creed are inextricably united - we confess our faith, die with Christ and are raised bodily from the waters with him.

The reason evangelical sexual ethics are so unintelligible is not actually because they are that far off from what the church has always taught. They are unintelligible because their sexual ethics are divorced from a larger theology of the body and creation. To insist on intellectual assent to a list of rules governing a largely bodily phenomenon lacks the imaginative force necessary to make evangelical sexual norms intelligible. Not only are the sexual norms of Christianity unintelligible in their own context, they are increasingly nonsensical as the liberal story of wider society becomes louder and more accepted as a reasonable story to accommodate the faith to. If evangelical Christians want to get serious about thinking through sexual ethics, more effort must be put into making the body an intelligible part of Christian worship and piety again. This might just lead evangelicalism to take those banished artists and feminists seriously again. A re-imagined evangelical sexual ethic will begin with baptism and will take seriously Theotokos, Immanuel, and the vast witness of the saints.