Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep997: #997 - Singleness, the “Gift of Celibacy,” and Healthy Complementarianism: Dr. Dani Treweek

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

What does it mean to have the gift of celibacy (or singleness)? Does it mean that you don’t desire sex or marriage? Or that you’ve been given an extra booster shot of the Holy Spirit that gives you radical immunity to sexual temptation (or at least prevents you from serious spiriutal hospitalization)? What actually was Paul talking about when he said that “it’s better to marry than to burn?” (1 Cor 7:7-8).  Dr. Dani Treweek is both single and a theological expert in singleness, having recently completed her Ph.D. on a theology of singleness and who’s publishing a book titled “The Meaning of Singleness” (IVP 2023). Dani is an ordained minister, theologian, speaker, writer, adn the founder of “Single Minded,” an evangelical Christian initiative which seeks to resource a positive, biblical conversation about singleness within the Christian life and community. To learn more about Single Minded: https://www.singleminded.community  To learn more about Dani: https://www.danielletreweek.com  If you would like to support Theology in the Raw, please visit patreon.com/theologyintheraw for more information!  –––––– PROMOS Save 10% on courses with Kairos Classroom using code TITR at kairosclassroom.com! –––––– Sign up with Faithful Counseling today to save 10% off of your first month at the link:  faithfulcounseling.com/theology –––––– Save 30% at SeminaryNow.com by using code TITR –––––– Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review. www.theologyintheraw.com

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. If you have benefited from the show and would like to support Theology in the Raw, you can do so through Patreon at patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. Support the show for as little as five bucks a month to get access to premium content that is exclusive for my Patreon supporters. Also, if you want to attend the Exiles in Babylon 2023 conference here in Boise, Idaho. You can go to theologyintherod.com. By the time this episode is released, I think the lineup of speakers, which will be a growing lineup of speakers and topics, I think all of that will be posted on the website. If it's not there yet, it will be very soon. Again, theologyintherod.com. Space is limited. We sold out last year.

So I think we'll probably sell out again this year. So if you do want to come out and attend live, I would sign up sooner than later. We are going to live stream it as well. So the virtual version of the conference will be available for as many people as want to watch it. So yeah, my guest today is somebody who I just recently came across, Danielle Trewek. I hope I pronounced that correctly. She helped me to pronounce her last name several times and I kept missing it. So I'm sure I missed it again then. But Danielle, which goes by Danny, is a Christian scholar who recently completed her PhD at St. Mark's Theological Center in Canberra, Australia. Her thesis was entitled The End of Singleness Towards a Theological Retrieval of Singleness for the Contemporary Church.

And she's also writing a book under a similar topic for IVP, which will be out next year. I had a wonderful conversation with Dani. She is a fantastic writer, a spicy writer, a very engaging writer. I would highly encourage you to check out her blog at danieltrowek.com. Lots of resources there. And yeah, never a dull moment in Dani's writing. So we had a great conversation primarily about singleness, 1 Corinthians 7, some contemporary questions about the church. And then we did talk about the complementarian egalitarian debates because Dani is an ordained minister who is also a complementarian, which makes it interesting. And she had some great thoughts about that. So please

welcome to the show for the first time, Danny Trawick. Thank you so much for tuning in to Theology in a Row all the way down from Australia. Is it close to midnight where you're at? I know it's like 7.30 my time here, AM. Yeah, it's about 20 to midnight. Okay. Well, at least for a few minutes, we're going to be on the same day. That is true.

That is true. It's always hard scheduling stuff with people in Australia. It's not the time thing we can work around, but it's the day. It's like, all right, we're on for Wednesday. Inesday i'm like well maybe like what do you mean by wednesday you know um and when you throw daylight savings into it it completely blows everything up yeah yeah yeah well i came across your work in a um very recently uh i didn't tell you this offline but uh very recently um in a twitter thread I was asking for names of female scholars who would be on the complementarian side of the women in ministry debate. And your name, among several

others, came up. So as names are popping up, some I recognize, some I'm like, I haven't heard of that person yet. So I would click on stuff and read. i clicked on your your your blog and i'm not i don't read a lot of blog i probably read like maybe five blogs a year like i don't i don't not i just have tons of books and other stuff i have to read i got so sucked in you're an amazing writer oh thank you you're a fantastic like spicy writer with a ton of like scholarly ump i was like wow i i don't see this a lot i mean this is really good stuff so i've probably read like six or seven of your blogs and just got sucked i mean the content too you're talking about singleness in first corinthian seven which i want to get into some of the content was great too but yeah i that's that's

not a small achievement because i can't write short either and so most of my my blog posts are quite long. So if you've read six or seven of them, you were there for a while. They were. Yeah, they were longer. I don't know. I feel like for myself, I tend to break the rules on what people say. Your podcast should be your blog.

Blog, make sure it's 800 words. I'm like, my most widely read blogs are over 2000 words. And I agree. Shorter reads are typically better. But I just wonder if like, I don't know, maybe it's because bloggers aren't typically great writers. And so after 800 words, people get kind of bored anyway. I don't know. Let's talk about singleness. How about you start with your story?

You are single, correct? Yes, I am. I'm single. I've never been married. Okay. And you did your PhD in like a theology of singleness. Is that correct? I did. I'm a doctor of singleness, technically. But yeah, that's what my PhD was in. Can you give us a snapshot summary of your doctoral thesis? And then

would love to dive into probably some particular areas of it. Yeah, sure. I wanted to write a book on singleness. And then I thought, well, people had encouraged me to write a book on singleness. And then I thought, well, people had encouraged me to write a book on singleness. And I thought, okay, well, I could write a book on singleness, and there will be another book on singleness that sits on the shelves and has nothing new or interesting to say that hasn't already been said. And so I really thought, is there something new or interesting to say? And so somehow that turned into a four-year full-time PhD. And thankfully I discovered, well, it wasn't that there was anything new to say, but really what I discovered was that our Christian ancestors have said lots of things about singleness, really exciting, wonderful, encouraging things about the dignity and the value and the importance of singleness, just for the single Christian but for the body of Christ as a whole stuff that we've just

completely forgotten that I certainly was completely unaware of right through the the ancient church through the medieval church and so really my my PhD was looking back at looking to see what we could retrieve from the past for a theology of singleness in the present. And my focus was particularly on how did how through Christian history have our Christian forefathers understood singleness as being eschatologically significant? By that, I mean, how does looking to eternity help us to understand the significance of singleness now? That's really where my research was focused on. And that's, my thesis has been turned into a book which is coming out next year. And so that's really going to be the full argument of the book. The meaning of singleness, it's with IVP. Well done landing an IVP contract. That's fantastic. Are you done with the manuscript now i would if he said if it's coming out next year i would imagine you're done or just about done with the literally 20 minutes

before we sat down to talk i was editing one of the chapters um i've got to get the final edits uh done in the next week or so but um hopefully it'll be out sometime in maybe spring next year i think at this stage how would your book differ from like so I've read like Barry Danilick's book, dabbled in a few other books. I know Wesley Hill's written on it. Are you bringing in more early church history interpretation of scripture? Is that where you differ or is there some fundamental differences between what Danny would say or Barry Danilick and Danny, you? Yeah. Well, Wes Hill was actually one of my PhD examiners, which was lovely. I didn't know about that.

I know Wes, but I didn't know he was one of my examiners until after I got the report back. And he was lovely. He gave me a glowing report. Barry Danilick's book is great. It's a biblical theology of singleness. I probably would disagree with him, particularly in the last few years. I've come to disagree with some of his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7 in particular, and we can probably talk a bit about some of that a bit later. But his book, Redeeming Singleness, is excellent in terms of tracing

scripture, singleness through the storyline of scripture. My research is really the question, sort of overarching question for my PhD research was, we talk about the meaning of singleness today being found in its, in the freedom or the time or the flexibility that singles apparently have for ministry and kingdom work. You know, we sort of say the meaning of singleness is located in what can be done with it. But we talk about marriage very differently. There is a sense in which we speak about marriage like that, but we also recognize that scripture talks about marriage having much more of a theological significance that points us all towards eternity. You know, we see the picture of human earthly marriage pointing us towards the eternal marriage in

heaven, which gives marriage itself now an inherent, an essential theological dignity, regardless of our experience of it. So even bad marriages, problematic marriages, troubled marriages, as tragic and terrible as they are, marriage itself still remains good. But we don't say that about singleness. If someone is unhappily single, then singleness, there's nothing good about their singleness. And so really what I was trying to engage with is, does scripture help us to see that there is something inherent to the single state for Christians that goes beyond just our experience of it and makes us actually eternally significant now in

the way that marriage is. I really, I do that through three particular ways. I look at a history, sort of a broad arching history of singleness, so to speak, through church history. I look at some of the key, a couple of the key biblical passages, and then I engage with four different theologians from across the course of history to sort of see what they have to say. And then I engage with four different theologians from across the course of history to sort of see what they have to say. And then I pull those threads together. I'm guessing, was Augustine one of them and you had three others? Augustine was one of them, as we call, Aussies call him Augustine. Augustine was one of them. Augustine. Augustine was one of them. A random medieval monk was another one. And it was brilliant delving into the Middle Ages like that. John Paul II, Pope John Paul II was one. And then

Stanley Howe was my last one. So I really sort of went through the sweep of Christian history. And it was really, it was fun actually looking at all of them. grape of Christian history. And it was really, it was fun actually looking at all of them. So in my little reading I've done in early church history, you know, it is fascinating that, you know, there was a kind of a live debate on whether singleness or marriage was better. And quite a few theologians kind of, well, I don't know, they kind of echo a little bit of Paul's language. Like, it's not wrong to get married. I'm not saying you're in sin, okay? But, you know, the single life is, if you really want to be really close to Jesus and therefore flourishing in life,

the single life is kind of where it's at. Is that, would that be, I mean, it seems like there's several like early fathers who kind of took that view, like. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was, this was actually the chapter I was just editing tonight. And as I was rereading it, I was reminded of just how complicated history is. I mean, you know, even if you sort of said to someone in a couple of hundred years time, could you give an overview of singleness within this 50 years from 1980 to 2030, it would be very difficult to do that comprehensively. So let alone then saying, all right, let's spend, you know,

what's 500 years of church history across the entire Roman Empire. It was very complicated and there was lots of people who said different things. And it wasn't as, they weren't as rah-rah singleness. I mean, they didn't have the word singleness. It was really virginity then they weren't as you know they weren't as fully focused on the superiority of virginity as we might think they might have been at certain times but yes that was definitely the dominant trajectory but what is again fascinating is that it was in large part because they had

their eyes set on eternity, because they were waiting for the new creation to come, because they didn't want to be living in this world for this world. And they saw virgins as those who really exemplified the new creation, which is to come in the sense of, I don't want to get into too much detail, but in the sense that none of us will be married in heaven, Jesus says in Matthew chapter 22, really the question then is if none of us are going to be married to each other in heaven, what does that mean for those who aren't married on earth? Does that not therefore give actually some special and unique dignity to not being married here and now? And so those were the kind of things that some of the early church fathers were wrestling with,

particularly through language of kind of being like the angels. And they also had some different ideas about Adam and Eve and whether they were sexually active before the fall. And really that dominated a lot of the discussion as well in ways that would seem very strange and odd to us um today yeah i mean their their view on just sex in particular was i don't know from my vantage point a little odd or a little i mean for sure they were you know sexist for procreation but even like there was i just read some stuff i can't remember the names but like even within marriage just procreation and if you're kind of enjoying it you're probably sinning a little bit but you know

it's kind of a necessary evil i'm like ah it's a little too far but yeah they're beyond single yeah foreign landscape to us today we're looking back at them but this is the point we have you know we live in an age where we think that we know everything. You know, we live in a time when we don't look back to history because it's what C.S. Lewis talks about as chronological snobbery. You know, we think we're the ones who really understand. We've got the goods. And so it can be tempting for us to look back to, you know, these ancient theologians and pastors and say, oh, my gosh, these people were crazy.

But actually, we have a lot to learn from them. We may not always agree with them. They wouldn't agree with us. But we have inherited so much from them. We've also forgotten so much that we could have inherited from them. And there's gems there to uncover if we're willing to go back and actually be humble. Yeah. I think we look at them and them and say wow you took all the romance out of marriage i think they would probably say you might put a little bit too much romance in in the marriage you know like you have no like rich theology of marriage and so when romance kind of wears off then the marriage is kind of like well if that's what marriage is all about that's in most cases nine out of ten it's gonna they're just the feelings of romance are gonna wear off and it's, well, if that's what marriage is all about, in most cases, 9 out of 10,

it's just the feelings of romance are going to wear off. And it's like, oh, well, if that's what marriage is all about, then my marriage must be done. So yeah, I don't know if we've nailed, I don't know if we have like the corner market on how to really have a successful, quote, successful marriage. I want to talk about this idea of the gift of singleness. Because in my work it comes up a lot and you know i hear people say why you know i don't if you have the gift then yeah

be seeing you know then singleness is for you it almost sounds like it almost it comes off almost like well if you're kind of like being independent and you're not lonely you're kind of an introvert you know maybe you're you have a really low libido like then you probably have the gift and you know then yeah i guess that's good for you but for the rest of us we really need you know a marriage marriage part like we can't exist without marriage i'm like i just don't know if that's what paul's saying in first corinthians 7 it's just it it just struck me as a little bit like, I don't think Paul would line up with that. Can you unpack that? What's your understanding of the gift of singleness? And yeah, what Paul's saying. Yeah. I mean, I must admit, I spent many,

many years confused about this, as I think most of us do. So, you know, we should clarify that we're talking about 1 Corinthians 7, verse 7. Let's start in verse, I can, you go ahead and read it. Verse 6, because that's where he uses the language of gifts. We assume that that kind of can probably, you know, does it carry over to the next verse, whatever. But yeah, verse 7 and 8, verse 7 and 8. Go for it. I'm reading from the ESV just because it's what I've got in front of me.

He says, verse seven, I wish that all were as I myself am, but each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. And what is on view there when he talks about as I myself am, it's pretty clear that what he's got on view there is his singleness. He's not married. We don't know, he could have been a widow.'s you know good reason to think that perhaps he would have been married but it's clear from this passage that he when he's writing to the Corinthians he's not and so really the gift of singleness I mean the gift of singleness isn't even a phrase in scripture uh you know you can see there he says each has his own gift from God

one of one kind and one of another and so the gift of singleness is really the phrase that's been coined. You know, it's a contemporary phrase to talk, to try and interpret this verse in a particular way. And the way it's generally interpreted is that Paul is saying here that there are some people, probably very few, they're rare, it goes, who have been given a special spiritual gift, a special spiritual empowerment from God. So it's kind of moving forward to later chapters in 1 Corinthians where Paul goes in to start talking about spiritual gifts, specifically spiritual gifts. And so people sort of import it back in here to 1 Corinthians 7 and say, he's got on view here a special, what I call booster shot of the Holy Spirit that's given to, you know, a select few

that means that they can quite happily do life as an unmarried person, not having sex, not being, not struggling with sexual temptation. This was the view that really I grew up with. I didn't hear any other view until probably my early twenties. And I remember reading a book that at the time was called The Single Issue. I think it was republished as Singles at the Crossroad by Al Su. It was published in the late nineties, I think. And he was the first one I ever read who said the gift of singleness is not a special empowerment. It's just the state of being single. Paul is just saying here, if you are single, you have the gift of singleness. If you are married, you have the gift of marriage. And that was kind of wow to me because I thought

that makes so much more sense of my experiences, a single person who would love to be married, who has a normal sexual libido, who struggles with sexual desire and temptation, but for whom God back then in my 20s and now in my 40s has not answered with the gift of a spouse. So what do I do with that? How do I reconcile a loving God who has said, you need a special spiritual gift to stay single and holy and godly as a single unmarried person, or you need to get married, but I'm not going to give you either marriage or the gift. What do I and the majority of single Christians do with that?

It's deeply inadequate, pastorally and theologically. And then as I began to think about it more and more, I liked Al Sue's solution. I wondered if it was too convenient. I just, I wasn't sure what the argument was behind it. And so I held it whilst also just being a little bit like, oh, am I just believing this because it suits me to believe it? But it really wasn't until I started doing some deep thinking about singleness theologically through my research that I just became more and more convinced that that traditional interpretation

of the gift of singleness as this special booster shot is just so contrary to so many other parts of scripture and our understanding of Scripture. You know, there is no other area of sin in the Christian life where we would ever suggest that you need some special booster shot of the Holy Spirit to enable you to resist that sin. You know, we don't say with greed or with lying or with impatience that the indwelling Spirit of God is not enough to sanctify you in that. But when it comes to sex, for some reason, that's what we say. And it was really interesting going back and realizing that so much of this is actually based

on the Reformation and the Reformation's view of sexuality. And actually this gift of singleness idea is completely contrary to anything that the ancient Christians thought of. It's actually completely opposite to the way that they thought about the power, the self-control and power available to the Christian by the Holy Spirit through the grace of God to say no to sin. That idea that if you are single, you have the gift. If you are married, that is the gift that God has given to you. I actually went back to a book I wrote that came

out in 2015. I said something kind of like that. And I remember I briefly was interacting with 1 Corinthians 7, read a few things. I might have read, I don't think I read Sue. I was interacting with people too, so I don't know where I got it. But I remember it just kind of clicked. I'm like, well, that does make a lot more sense of what, like when I read Paul with that in view, I was like, oh, his language makes more sense to me now.

So I said something like that back then, but I haven't really done what I haven't wrestled with as much is what Paul says in verse eight, nine. So, you know, to the unmarried and the widows, I say, it's good for them to stay unmarried as I do, but if they cannot control themselves, they should marry. So, I mean, isn't it that statement where we get this idea? And it even is built into, some people talk about various purposes of marriage. And one of them they say is a remedy for sin. And they quote this, like, it's, you know, which even that I'm like, oh, that just feels potentially misogynistic. But also, like, you're going to rush into a marriage because you just really want to have sex and you feel like you can't control yourself.

Like, Ooh, I don't know. I just have red flags going up. Um, but what's Paul's exact kind of, I mean, I can see where people would get that from based on what Paul says. Yeah. And that's right. It is right. I mean, versus versus eight and nine are really instrumental in, in, in unpacking that further

thing is that when we read this in our sort of contemporary modern day context where we are kind of living in this sex-soaked, sex-obsessed world where, you know, sexual gratification is literally at our fingertips on our computer at any moment of the day that we want to achieve it. What it means for us to not be able to exercise self-control in our heads is if I have any sexual desire at all and it makes me uncomfortable trying to resist this, then I'm not cut out for singleness. You know, that's the way that our brains sort of go. That's the way that a lot of the commentary on these verses are, that if you can't exercise

self-control, i.e. if you have a normal sexual libido, experience sexual desire, sexual temptation, then you're not cut out to remain single. And I think we have to weigh a few things up there. The first is that in other parts of scripture, Paul talks about the indwelling spirit of God, the person of God himself working within us to cultivate spiritual fruit, one of which is self-control. You think about the fruits of the spirit, self-control is a fruit of the spirit. So I think we have to be very careful before we say, oh, well, I can't possibly be self-controlled because we've actually been given, God himself has come to live within us to cultivate the fruit

of self-control in our lives. So what are we actually therefore saying about the power of God to work in us if we say I can't possibly be self-controlled myself? But in terms of this particular verse, without getting into too much of the sort of the verse detail, I think a few things to pick up on is he doesn't say if they think they can't exercise self-control. He says if they cannot exercise self-control. And, in fact, sorry to be the bore who says in the original Greek, but in the original Greek it's actually a present tense. It's if they are not exercising self-control.

So there's a sense in which he's writing to people who are actively sexually committing sexual immorality, and in the context it seems to be betrothed people and widows who are possibly in a relationship with someone who they could be married to. They're not married to them, but they are not exercising self-control. And is that you say it's likely that they are in some kind of relationship headed towards marriage or whatever. That's a modern way of putting it. He based that on verse 8 when he says he's addressing the unmarried and the widows. And this is something I've recently kind of come across that in the Greco-Roman culture, it was...

I think Caesar Augustus... Well, maybe not him, but I think there were some some laws almost some legal ramifications that widows should be remarried within three years or something or whatever it was don't call me on that but it was like very very very likely that widows would get remarried fairly quickly so the fact that he's addressing widows and commentators are split on whether the when he says unmarried and widows that he is talking about male and female, widowed and widow? What's the male widow? The widow and the widower, yeah.

And we can come back to that. it's very likely that these people he's addressing would be headed toward a remarriage really fairly soon if they're not like right in that moment. So they're having sex with somebody that they are very, very likely going to be married to. Is that? Yeah, possibly. And I mean, we've also got betrothed on view in this chapter as well. What I think we have to remember, and I've written something about this in a Christianity Today article, that if people go to my Twitter profile, it's pinned to the top. So you can go and have a look there. But what we have to remember is the cultural context back then in the first century for unmarried people was incredibly different to our context today. If I was born in the first century, my parents would have arranged a marriage for me.

I would have had almost no agency in who I married, when I married them, why I married them. This was very much part of getting married was part of what you did as a societal and familial responsibility. And so we read back into these passages from our perspective where single people, even someone like myself who would love to be married has not been married, I have still been able to exercise a huge amount of agency in my decisions in this regard that would have been completely foreign to first century Christians. So we just have to be very careful as we think about this, not to superimpose our context directly onto the ancient context.

And so Paul is writing to, particularly when he's writing to betrothed Christians, he's writing to people who are in some sort of formal arrangement to marry. They're not yet married, but their families have engaged some sort of almost legal possibly contract that these people would marry. So it's not just if you could find someone to marry, it's you could marry this person at this point tomorrow if you wanted to. Certainly widows, and less so widowers, but widows, there would have been, you know, it would have been very isolating

and an insecure existence living as a first century female widow. It's not like today where there is a degree of economic and social security. And so again, there's all sorts of different relational dynamics at play that we need to take into account when we're reading this verse. And so when Paul says, if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry, Paul says, if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. He's not just saying, if you feel sexual desire, then you're not meant to be single. He's writing to specific people who are engaged in specific activity with specific others saying, if you're having sex with each other, you should be married because it is better to marry than to burn now again we've got most of our translations say burn with passion scripture just says to burn so is it burn with passion is

it burn in terms of judgment is there much of a difference i'm not sure but again if this is just about doing the hard work with the bible rather than just sort of running our context through our lens and sort of deciding, okay, that's what it means. Do you think in verse 8 he's addressing widower and widow? Or do you think that it's talking about unmarried and unmarried state as a whole? Because he does, I mean, I used to think just unmarried state as a whole, but then the fact that it is paired with widow and that he does this, he has a whole section on the, the,

you know, virgins later. Yeah. And so he seems to, he seems to be very organized in the kind of category of person he's talking to. So I was a little bit persuaded that I think the Greek word is Agamas, like just unmarried,

not virgin that he's using unmarried here in reference to a widower? Or is that, what do you think about that? I think he's using it as an umbrella term for unmarried, a bunch of people fit into. The reason I think that is because, well, that the term does just mean unmarried. And then at other points, he talks specifically to the virgins, to the betrothed, to the widows. He does include widows here in verse 8, but he also says in verse 11, for example, he's talking to women who have separated from her husband, verse 11, that if she does, she should remain unmarried.

It's the same word there. So if he's using, you know, divorced to speak about and unmarried together, he refers to himself as being unmarried. He could be a widow, or sorry, a widower, or he may have been never married. We don't know. I think in this chapter, he's just constantly moving back and forth between all these different categories of marital situations okay okay that's good um no that's super helpful and uh yeah it was in your blog yeah the booster shot christian and just it just i never thought about that way that like resisting sexual immorality is something all christians are called to do like that's not like

and and nowhere else if you say if it's just overwhelming just run out and get a wife real quick you know like and you know i'm not married i've never had sex so you know i'm not particularly qualified to speak about this but i do have lots of married friends who talk about their struggle with sexual control sexual self-control you know why don't married people need the special booster shot that allows them just to be faithful to this one person? You know, it's just, I just, the more I think about it, the more I think just stands contrary to our whole understanding of the way

that the spirit sanctifies us. Well, also in the Greco-Roman culture, it was very, very common for married men to have a prostitute on the side maybe a concubine maybe a slave they're at first certainly a slave for the 20 of people who own slaves sexual service is very common and it was that wasn't seen as like like like the the writers would say the wife would become annoyed like again all right well you know like but they were just expected to kind of put up with it to say that it was like

immoral like when christianity came along and held both men and women the same standard like that was shocking and we know from corinth that paul's dealing with a lot of like a residue of kind of greco-roman sexual um moral thinking so um it's not just single people who are going to be wrestling with, you know, temptations towards sexual immorality. That's really helpful. I want to move like practically in the church. What's been your experience like in the church as a single person of marital age? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I mean, do you think the church has had a really good, healthy theology of singleness? Or do you think their view of singleness and marriage has been a little bit off? What does that look like for you?

Well, certainly after you read my book, you'll be no doubt that the church has had a really poor theology of singleness for a long time. The first year of my PhD, I spent reading every book I could find, every article I could find, listening to every podcast and sermon and conference talk that really touched on singleness at all. It was an exhausting, depressing year. At the end I was really glad that I did it because at the end of it I really came up with what I kind of talk about as a diagnosis of the way that we think about singleness today

as evangelical Christians. we think about singleness today as evangelical Christians. But it was pretty confronting about just how, just how one author I read described it this way, and I've used it ever since. She talks about our theology of singleness being passive and palliative. And I think that's exactly what it is. Speaking personally, I mean, I have had, as most, well, we all do, single or married, various seasons in my life where, you know, I have been more or less content in the situation that God has given me. I've had people in my life who have helped me or hindered me in various ways. That's just a reality of being sinful people living in a sinful fallen world. I think God has for many years was cultivating a degree of contentment and resilience in my singleness that I hadn't anticipated.

And I look back now and I can see that he was probably doing that in order for me to be able to do what I do now, which is really spend a lot of time in the kind of the depths of this without being consumed by the despair of it. So I'm sort of able to separate myself back a little bit. But the reason I do this ministry is because I know that there are so many single Christians out there. Now, whether they are, and I should say single, when I say single, I don't just mean people like myself who would never be married. You know, there's widows, there's divorcees, those who are same-sex attracted, those who are opposite-sex attracted.

There's all sorts of different contexts and circumstances. And the reason I do what I do is because I just think we have, as an evangelical church, have not loved these integral members of Christ's body in the way that we should have. We haven't valued and dignified them in the way that we should be. And in doing that, we're not just hurting them, we're actually hurting who we are as the body of Christ. And so I'm really motivated by that. That's been my motivation to be able to make a contribution that actually helps move us forward in whatever way it might be. you know in whatever way it might be i've learned so much from my single friends about friendship you know um because again i'm just oh everything i say is obviously from my american context so

i don't know how much to translate to your context but like married people married christians typically really suck at friendship like because we we been, we've been told that like all your loneliness will be solved in marriage. And then, so we invest all this relational energy into marriage and it becomes kind of the thing that you focus on, which we've got a very high view of marriage. And I, and, and some of that's like, yeah, I think that that's good. You should prioritize that in many ways, but it just becomes so like inwardly focused. And it's just you're staring at each other and fulfill my needs, meet all my needs, meet all my relational needs. And then it's like your friendship muscles start to atrophy.

And then you have so many lonely married people. Or you'll talk to people at church and they're married and they just kind of look at you glazed over like hey what's your what's your name okay good okay all right yeah you know i don't know it's just not but like my single friends are like i need i need friend like i i can't survive without i can live without they always say you know i can live without sex but i can't live without love and intimacy like i need human interaction and community and deep meaningful conversations so they have these robust friendship muscles that are like oh my gosh like you do this so well you know how to dig deep you're meaningful you know how to ask good questions you can you like staying up late and talking about meaningful things you know like um so i just yeah i just over the years i've

learned so much about friends and this goes back to your point about not just singles needing the church, but the church needing singles. Yeah. So I've got, I have a bit of a hobby horse on this one. I'll try and not write it for too long. Feel free. We got time. And I need to be very careful about what I say.

So let me be very clear. One of the things, well, a couple of things. In advocating and wanting to honour singleness, I want to do that in a way that doesn't diminish the significance of marriage. I think it is entirely possible. I mean, the Apostle Paul does it. He's able to say marriage is wonderful, singleness is wonderful. He says it's kind of better, but you know, he's able to hold these two without elevating one so that the other is diminished. And I really, you know, I strive to do that myself. And so I always feel like I need to say in seeking to esteem singleness, I'm in no way seeking to diminish marriage because I understand how important it is in so many ways for so many reasons. So that's the first thing to say. And the second thing to say before I sort of jump on the hobby horse is that I also understand how important friendship is

within marriage. You know, I can only imagine that to not actually be able to call your spouse, your friend must be terribly difficult and painful. Friendship is, you know, even more, I think, than romance integral to healthy, godly marriage. But one of my, this is the hobby horse, I'm concerned that we Christians are trying to subsume the essence of friendship into marriage so that they basically become one and the same thing. You know, think of how many social media posts you see of people's anniversaries, wedding anniversaries. I love celebrating them. But think about how many of them talk about another year being married to my very best friend. And I think what you're saying there is that the ideal, the kind of the epitome, the top experience of friendship, that friendship possibly has to offer you, is found in marriage.

And if that's the case, why do you need other friends? You know, if this one person is going to be everything to you, then your other friends become peripheral at that sense. And that, as you were saying, puts an enormous pressure on marriage, on one person to be everything that another person needs. And I think we have to be very careful not to subsume this ideal of friendship into marriage, because I really love, there's a theologian called Stanley Grintz, who has a lovely way of speaking about friendship. He talks about it as kind of this ever open, ever inclusive, ever hospitable relationship where it's not like marriage. It's not exclusive. It's not just with one person. It's not just this is it forever or for life, but it's dynamic. It's open to change. It welcomes other people in.

But it's dynamic. It's open to change. It welcomes other people in. It acknowledges that sometimes friendships change, diminish, leave. And so I think we need to be careful to keep the two things distinct whilst also recognizing there is significant overlap between marriage and friendship as well. No, that's so good. And it's been so ingrained in our marriage kind of trajectory that, yeah, you're marrying your best friend. And again, if that happens, that's great.

I love what you said at the end about the openness of marriage. I'm just thinking practically and I'm just speaking anecdotally here. So, I mean, take it or leave it. But over the years with my wife and I, we've been married over 20 years now. And there's a certain special joy I get when we're around other people and I see her interacting with other people and like, you know, laughing at somebody else

and somebody else is included in the conversation like that. It just brings us energy to our marriage. And like, you know, sometimes we're always like, oh, should we go on a date just us, whatever. And we do that. But there's sometimes where I'm like, no, I want to hang out with you with other people like not because i'm sick of you and i want to be around other people it's

like i enjoy you when you're with other people like there's a whole dynamic there's different relationships personalities that open it kind of error rate our relationship and that's something i've only realized more more recently really the ancients you know marriage was like you'd be a married woman to raise your kids pass on their family line or whatever maybe she's wealthy or gain social status or you know some stuff that i'm like i don't necessarily want to baptize all that either but and you know for them friendships were always outside of like no you go hang out with your friends and you come home and you know your wife has a meal waiting for you or whatever and it's

like okay i don't want to baptize that but there is something about their high view of friendship as married people that the ancients had that i'm like i think we could redeem some of that a little more you know yeah and i mean speaking personally i can only attest to how incredibly profoundly thankful i am for multiple married friends in my own life who have not just continued to invest in friendship with me personally but who have invited me into their life and I want to be careful because it sounds a bit weird into their marriage not in a weird way but I mean it included me in their life you know I don't just go and hang out with one of them or the other. I go and hang out with both of them.

I have, you know, I have married male friends who will see something I've posted on Facebook and think, oh, I'm going to check in with Danny and see if she's okay. And they'll pick up the phone and they'll call me. And their wife, who is also my friend, is not at all fazed by that. In fact, encourages, encourages you know my friendship with her husband doesn't see me as kind of a threat to their marriage in any way and i have just been profoundly blessed by that um and would so love to have seen more people being blessed in that same way oh that's fantastic you had a little a recent run-in with was it doug wilson online

i don't typically like to bring i just that's how i came across it like oh A recent run-in with, was it Doug Wilson online? I don't typically like to bring it. That's how I came across it. I'm like, oh, what's this all about? Well, I wrote an open letter. Look, I've spent seven years reading stuff on singleness, and I'm normally fairly robust in kind of going, oh, here we go again, and shrugging it off and moving on. But there was an interview with Doug Wilson and Michael Foster on YouTube that someone sent to me and I just thought,

nah, and it was on the gift of singleness stuff. It was a few things, but I just thought, no, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to write something that addresses this. And I wasn't intended to be writing. It was intended to be an open, it was an open letter to them saying, I would really like to understand how you reconcile what you've said in this video with all these other things and i didn't i honestly didn't expect that there would be engagement from either of them um or at least robust engagement and there wasn't and that's fine um i really wrote it because i wanted to encourage other people who might watch this video or come across it or some of their other teaching to kind of start asking questions. I would assume he very humbly, you know, apologized for getting things wrong and, and, you know, went back to the text

and reconsidered what the Bible says. And that's what I would have assumed would have happened. That's shocking that he didn't change his mind. I mean, I wasn't expecting him to. I think, you know, without having a go at him or Michael Foster, I don't know either of them personally. And, you know, I know people who have great respect for their ministry in other ways. And so I don't want to, you know, buy into the cancel culture moment that we live in and say these people are awful and you should never listen to anything they say.

But there has just been so deeply entrenched for so many years, this very, I think, harmful and even quite abusive theology of singleness in some circles. And this video was a reflection of some of that. Some of the comments describing singles are like not pretty enough to get married kind of thing. It was really toxic. It was.

Yeah. Yeah, it was really toxic it was yeah yeah yeah it was people if people look hard enough people can find it if they go to my blog they'll be able to find the open letter and they can watch the video themselves if they want to but um i think i would want to say if you're someone who struggles with if you're single and you feel hurt and alienated by some of the teaching that you've been you've heard over the years don't go and watch the video it's just gonna upset you more um but if you're not single you're not in that place and you actually want to engage with these things go and watch it read what i had to say and have a think about it um and and you know come to your own mind on it you're you're gracious um can we turn the corner a little bit because I first came across your name because you were one of many female scholars who is a complementarian that somebody recommended whose work I should check out.

But then I started looking at your credentials and you're a pastor. You're a female pastor as a complementarian, right? Or you're ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church. Do you have the title pastor? I mean, are you a complementarian female pastor? Because that would be really cool. Well, I mean, I have used the word pastor before. Pastor isn't a word.

It's more of an American, well, it's a biblical term. In Anglican context, we tend to talk about ministry and ministers more than pastors. So I've spoken about myself as being a minister, and particularly a women's minister in the past. So I don't currently work in a church, but I went to theological college, and after that, I was ordained as a deacon. So in the Anglican system, you can be ordained as a deacon, and then a priest, and then you couldn't become a bishop. You can be ordained as a deacon and then a priest, and then you couldn't become a bishop.

Well, very few people will become a bishop. I'm complementarian by conviction, and so I would never choose to be ordained as a priest and a bishop. But I think being ordained as a deacon is completely consistent with my complementarian theology, and particularly then how I express that in practice is the other issue. and particularly then how I express that, you know, in practice is the other issue. So I am technically a reverend, though I very rarely use that title. I only use it when I'm trying to catch someone's attention, such as in an open letter to somebody. So how would you describe your, because I know there's different brands of complementarianism,

and I know some people don't even like these terms anymore, but for lack of better terms, like how would you, yeah, how would you describe, I was going to give you some options, but I'm sure you know the options. I think it is getting harder and harder, isn't it? To kind of use that language in a way that has genuine meaning across all sorts of different landscapes. that God created men and women absolutely equal in his image, absolutely equal in his love for them in their dignity as human beings. I also think that God created there to be certain responsibilities given to certain men in certain contexts. And so I hold that in the church and in marriage, God has created an intended good order between men and women. I don't take that to be extrapolated into every relationship with every man and every woman. I'm particularly talking about the church and in marriage. I'm not married, so I can't speak from that personally, but as a Christian woman, I'm absolutely committed to

what I talk about it as creative complementarianism, not in the way of how do you get around it, how do you be creative with it, but how do you be faithfully imaginative with partnership in ministry, in church between men and women. So I often get confused, for example, when I hear people who are critiquing complementarians sort of say, well, what about Romans 16 and all, you know, all the women that Paul talks about there, as if that's sort of some massive confrontation to my belief. Actually, I fully embrace Romans 16, because there I see Paul honouring the ministry and the service, and in context, the leadership of women.

I'm all for us doing that as complementary and Christians in a way that also I think reflects the biblical exhortations for men to be elders and for women not to exercise teaching authority over men in the church so so because i know like like i just got done reading craig blomberg and and talking to gary brashir's and they have a view of like male only elders but elders aren't the only teachers and certainly aren't the only ones that are supposed to be doing pastoring you know like shepherding people so they would be some people call them soft complementarians, male only elders, but yeah, female, you know, you have female prophets, obviously in the new Testament, which is similar to like teachers and preachers still under the authority of an, of a overarching elder, a servant foot washing, um,

humble inside out kind of authority. Like, like, I think that's a big piece that's often missed is the whole new Testament vision turns the concept of authority on its head. So even when you say in authority, it has nothing to do about superiority or priority or inferiority. It has to do with responsibility in, in overseeing the spiritual direction or whatever. Yeah.

Where would you line up on that? Would you still see, like, would you teach on a Sunday morning under the authority of a male leadership or would you not go there? No, personally, I, well, no, personally, I wouldn't. I wouldn't get up and give a sermon on a Sunday morning. You know, my take is that even if, as I'm doing that under the authority of someone else, I'm still exercising authority in the act of what I'm doing. But having said that, there are lots of other things that I will very happily do up the front of church on a Sunday morning. And I don't

just mean singing or doing prayers or making the announcements. And so, for example, I have gone to numerous church, I've been invited to numerous churches where I've gotten up and instead of the sermon that day, the pastor or the minister has done an extended interview with me where I've sort of engaged with some of the things that I've been researching and thinking about, almost a form of prophecy in a way, a word, you know, personal exhortation. I founded and lead a parachurch ministry called Single Minded. You know, I run webinars, I've given webinars, I will be chairing our

upcoming conference in a couple of weeks time. So it's not in any sense that I don't think there aren't really important and very creative and many opportunities for women to be involved in contributing to the church as a whole in really important ways. And I think that's one of the things that I find difficult about the critique of complementarianism, that, you know, because I personally believe that I, well, I'm convicted that I shouldn't get up and give a sermon to a mixed congregation, that I'm about silencing women. Not at all. You know, I've done a PhD in theology. I'm running a parachurch ministry. I've got all sorts of, I've got endless opportunities. And it's often, usually men who are inviting me to come and be involved and contribute.

And I do think that this might be a bit of a cultural difference between my context in Australia and the US. You know, I know the US is a very big place and so I don't want to be too prescriptive. And I also don't want to give the indication that we've got everything sorted down here because we haven't, you know, we're imperfect too. But my sense is that perhaps my experience of being a complementarian woman has been a more positive and encouraging and fruitful one than for many American women is the sense that I get particularly from social media. So I don't know if I should be listening to that or not. Yeah, maybe. That's interesting. I've spent a little bit of time in Australia. So I kind of can see where you're going. I've spoken at churches there, hung out with Christian leaders. And there is something about, I'm trying to search for a good term here, because there's

so many loaded terms. But I'll just, let me just say this american masculinity there is something there you know um and and you know we have a unique history as as a country and and i you know people often my australian friends have often described australia as kind of somewhere in between america and like the you know the uk like where you do have a little bit that kind of cowboy independent spirit but you still have the kind of British spirit as well. And then people who live there know what I'm talking about. But yeah, there is something about American masculinity that has very much spilled over to the church that is unique to the American Christian experience. might have experienced not that as much in Australian churches, where even a complementarian theological structure would probably have a higher percentage. I'm trying to be so careful.

A higher percentage of super humble men who think this church would close tomorrow if it wasn't filled with amazing ministers who are females who are carrying this church you know without them this church would not flourish in the kingdom of god absolutely neat even though they might have a for theological reasons a structure a certain ecclesiology that has men in certain positions um would that be i mean i um and i'm just thinking of people the australian leaders that i know and they're like, yeah, they're all – don't fit the kind of American masculinity kind of spirit at all. Yeah, and I think there's probably truth to that though. You could talk to any number of egalitarian Australian women who would dispute that and who would say no and who would have a similar critique of complementary men in Australia. It might look a bit different the expression of

that might not be quite so as you you know talked about sort of the us kind of style of masculinity um but certainly you know i grew up i i as a sydney anglican our reputation is kind of this ultra conservative fundamentalist kind of and so i've i've always grown up thinking well that's you know i i really am very ultra conservative compared to anybody else in the rest of the world with my beliefs and then I got on Twitter and I realized oh gosh no I'm a crazy liberal compared to some of these people so I think there really is a spectrum and there's just different cultural expressions of that and again I don't mean to imply that my kind of context of complementarianism

has kind of got this down pat. We don't. I've got frustrations. You know, I talk about them quite often. But I do also personally feel, have feel very well supported and encouraged. And, you know, where I am now has largely been at the encouragement and fostering of lots of Christian men in leadership who have really prompted me and supported me and in many ways, you know, resourced me to be able to do the ministry that I do. And so I have a lot of respect and thankfulness for them. I just thought of something that I don't know if this has come up in the conversation. I guess this would be a more of the complementarian side, but like, where does podcasting fit

into this? Like what's the theology of podcast or ecclesiology of podcasting? Because I mean, you've spent 20, 30 minutes unpacking the Greek texts of first Corinthians seven and eight to at least 10,000 men, many of whom who don't know Greek who are like, wow, well, she's smarter than I am. And like, there's a certain level of, I don't want to say authority, but like kind of like your, your academic credentials are higher than most of my male audience. And, and people would say, well, it's not, this isn't a Sunday morning. You know, it's like, what if they listen to the

podcast on Sunday morning? Well, it's not inside of a Sunday morning. You know, it's like, what if they listen to the podcast on Sunday morning? Well, it's not inside of a church building. Okay. Is that the distinction? Well, it's not in a group. It's not in a group. You know, what if they listen in a group? I don't know.

They're not allowed to. Should they not listen to Theology in a group when there's a female exegeting a passage? Or is it because in the conversation and the assumption is I will correct you because I'm a man. And if you say something, but I'm here learning from you. I don't know. You spent more time in the Greek is I will correct you because I'm a man. And if you say something, I'm here learning from you. You spent more time in the Greek than I have here. So I don't know. It's just weird. How does this fit in?

I'm sorry if I violated your convictions by bringing you on. Oh, gosh. No, no, no. You haven't at all. It is complicated. And this is something that I continue to think through, particularly with my ministry, Single Minded. And the webinars that I do there and the content I deliver, I have to make sure that I'm being faithful to my, you know, theological convictions and not just kind of let them go

because it might be convenient for me to do that. But in terms of your question, I do think it's not so much, you know, is it a Sunday morning? Are there people around? But for me, you know, the exaltation to eldership happens in relationship in the gathered body of Christ in the local community of God's people who meet together as the body of Christ, you know. And so as people are listening to this podcast, they're listening to Christians talk with each other and we're called to exhort and rebuke and teach and correct each other. We're not gathered together as the body of Christ in pastoral relationship with, you know, this community of people that we call our family.

Even though you and I are family, we are a brother and sister in Christ. I think, you know, when you look at the passages on view that talk about the role of men and women in the church, it's clear to me, at least, that the context is the local gathered body of Christ in relationship with each other. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't possibly implications that come from that for other contexts. But again, a little bit like what we were talking about with singleness and sort of the contemporary and the ancient context, we can't just superpose one thing directly onto the other. We have to do the hard work of negotiating where those things cross over. And I am certainly still continuing to try

and work that through faithfully myself. I definitely don't have all the answers, but I will be committed to actually being faithful and godly in being proactively in pursuing this. There is some interesting, just ecclesiological diversity in the main kind of passages that talk about men and women. I mean, the Corinthian church seems to be a bit more democratic, if you will. You know, like you have in 1 Corinthians 14, you get the picture of one person has a prophecy and interpretation, and then this prophet needs to keep this other prophet in check. And this person brings a teaching, this one an exhortation. And there's no real male-female distinctions there. You have females prophesying in 1 Corinthians 11.

And it seems to be a lot of just kind of back and forth and then you get to the pastorals and there does seem to be a bit more of a ironed out leadership structure and is it is it a development in Paul's thought is it yeah look what happened to the Corinthian church because because we didn't have a leadership structure so later on in Paul's life, he's like, hey, we need to start, you know, or is it different context? You know, is it Ephesus, Crete versus Corinth? You know, there's just, there's so many, we're listening to one side of the telephone conversation when we're reading Paul's letters and that with, and male female relationships

in the ancient world, in the Greco-Roman world are very different and very complex in the first century even between palestine and greco broader greco-roman world and there's so many of those and i don't want to say you have to be like a scholar and all this to understand the bible but kind of i don't know like it's complex first grint is 11 is so incredibly complex i've read that passage for years and until i really dig into deep research in every single verse and a lot of stuff starts opening up i'm like oh my word like this is a really really complicated chapter which which which going back to our i don't know if this is offline or whatever but like when people are so black and white on their views on this stuff it

is a little bit like man i don't don't know. I'm not an idiot. You're not an idiot. I see a lot of complexity here. I just feel like, I don't know if I'll ever have a strong 100% black and white view on my views wherever I end up landing on it all. That's right. And I think it's important for us to bring that humility to our understanding, our reading of Scripture,

and to our conversations with each other. Like you, I wrestle with this idea that you can spend, I mean, like 1 Corinthians 7, I can spend seven years kind of dipping back and forth into that chapter and still be confused about aspects of it and still look at it and think, oh, I've just read that in a completely different way than I had before. So I'm confronted with the complexity of God's Word in that sense. But I'm also excited by the fact that you can also pick up the Bible and read it. And even when you've got lots of unanswered questions, God's Spirit is still at work through His living and active Word, teaching you truth and helping you to actually comprehend His truth. And so I think that's part of the joy of Scripture is

that we can never, we will never master it because it's not there to be mastered. It's there to be, you know, to dwell within us by the Spirit as we come to understand and know him more and more, which doesn't mean that we should think that Scripture isn't clear, you know, but I do think there's a humility we need and more, which doesn't mean that we should think that scripture isn't clear. Right. You know, but I do think there's a humility we need to bring to our reading of scripture and in our conversations with each other about it. Yeah, that's so good.

Well, Danny, that's a great word to end on. I can't thank you enough for, first of all, coming on Theology Raw. It's past midnight where you're at now. And thank you so much for your writing. I'm so excited for your book to come out. I'm sad I have to wait nearly a year to read it. Or maybe you can give me an early copy of the manuscript. Maybe I'll give you one and you can write the endorsement.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, send it my way. Can't promise anything, but I'm fascinated in the topic. And I think it is one of those that has been largely misunderstood. And I think you bring a lot of just breath of fresh air to, to the conversation. So yeah. Thanks so much for being on the show, Danny. Thanks for having me. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.