Final Thoughts on the TGC Sex Article

Photo by JAN Pictures on Unsplash

Okay, it’s been over a week since TGC published an excerpt of “that article” about sex and marriage with a cringy typology set forth by Joshua Butler. TGC has apologized, Butler has resigned from The Keller Centre, Water Brook/Multonomah Press has remained silent, while social media, blogs, and podcasts have been awash with responses and responses to the responses.

The most helpful things I’ve encountered are:

First, Devi Abraham’s panel of excellent guests talking about what happens when you take Ephesians 5 too far. Easily the best debrief on the saga of book, publishers, TGC, apology, and harmful sex-theology. Seriously, drop what you are doing and listen to this! You will thank me for sharing the show with you!!!

Second, Beth Felker Jones, author of Faithful: A Theology of Sex, published a lengthy and learned response to the article. She warns, inter alia of “the pornification of the Christian sexual imagination.” Jones is easily the most thoughtful theologian writing responses to this episode.

To build on a previous post, I have several postmortem reflections about what is wrong and why. Note, I don’t think Josh Butler alone should bear the brunt of the blame for this episode. It is the publisher, TGC, and the patriarchal eroticization of the Bible that is at play.

First, opposition to the article was the most ecumenical evangelical event I’ve seen for a long time. Responses to Butler’s book excerpt united every evangelical faction with their mutual concern, confusion, and critique of its eroticized depiction of Christ’s relationship to the church. Egalitarians, complementarians, Calvinists, Arminians, everyone was affronted by the excerpt.

Second, I feel genuinely sorry for Bulter, as I tweeted:

Michael F. Bird @mbird12

I sincerely wish @butlerjosh all the best. I hope the ordeal of having a book that he's worked hard on get the third-degree will lead to reflection, contrition, and growth. Hopefully, he will listen to critics, redraft the book, and beta-test it with a wider crowd.

Butler is an Arizona pastor, I’ve had people write to me and rave about what a sweet and swell guy he is even if in error on this topic. I see no reason to doubt that I hope comes out of this chastened rather than flattened. I get the feeling that TGC, after commending the book as the “magnum opus” of Protestant sexual ethics, has now thrown Butler under the bus. But that simply masks the underlying problem as Aimee Byrd points out:

Aimee Byrd @aimeebyrdPYW

Removing Butler as a TGC speaker or fellow of their new Apologetics Center does not remove the theological system & Aristotelian anthropology that the book sprung from & was heavily promoted in. They do not cleanse themselves by erasing Butler. Or Driscoll. Or MacDonald.

For case in point, read Kevin De Young’s response. KDY offers an initially thoughtful critique about Butler’s “lurid and specifically sexual” metaphors. But then KDY has to complain about Butler getting canceled, “the article was not good. The mob was worse.” No, it wasn’t! The critique was diverse and deserved, united on the inappropriateness of the language and the potential harmfulness of that way of describing sexual union.

Third, a continued testimony to TGC’s failure to listen and learn! For me, this is the biggest takeaway. I remember a TGC article from over ten years ago, when Jared Wilson was advocating Doug Wilson’s view of sex in marriage: “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Despite many critical responses, Jared Wilson doubled down! To be clear, that is precisely a Greco-Roman view of sex: man as active women as passive, men as dominators women as dominated. It is a pagan view of sex as power. According to Deborah Kamen and Sarah Levin-Richardson, “In the realm of sexual matters, the Romans were particularly concerned with the issue of who penetrated whom. Penetrating was associated with free born status, masculinity, and social dominance, whereas being penetrated was associated with servility, femininity, and inferiority.”

Call me cynical, but I predict that in another ten years, TGC will promote another author with another sex book, and it will be the same sordid sex story of man as the powerful penetrator all over again. TGC-America needs its license to talk about marital intimacy revoked. No more pastors acting as sex experts just because they read Song of Songs.

Fourth, whoever is running Multnomah Publishing needs to do an autopsy on this painful event, the commissioning, editing, reviews, endorsements, publicity, and how they stayed silent in the face of overwhelming criticism.

That’s probably a good note to end on!