The Gospel Coalition seemingly endorses phallic worship – and inadvertently makes the case for woman elders
Three days ago, the Gospel Coalition put out a preview from a book by Josh Butler, named Beautiful Union: How God’s Vision for Sex Points Us to the Good, Unlocks the True, and (Sort of) Explains Everything. Keep in mind that this is not a self-published article and book by a lone blogger. The article was reviewed and published by the Gospel Coalition. It is from a book reviewed and published by Multnomah Publishers, the parent company of which is Penguin Random House. It bears the header The Keller Centre – a Centre for Apologetics where Josh Butler is a fellow. This means that several men in three different religious organizations saw and endorsed Butler’s writings. (Society would probably be better off if nobody named J. Butler, whether male or female, wrote any books about sex. But I digress. I thought of Judith Butler for a moment.)
The front cover of Josh Butler’s problematic book. It already occupies Amazon’s #19 spot in “Ethics in Christian Theology – even though it is still a month before the April 11th release date.
He wrote:
“[W]hat deeper form of self-giving is there than sexual union where the husband pours out his very presence not only upon but within his wife?…
[I]n sexual union… the groom … enters the sanctuary of his spouse, where he pours out his deepest presence and bestows an offering, a gift, a sign of his pilgrimage, that has the potential to grow within her into new life.
This is a picture of the gospel… Christ gives himself to his beloved with extravagant generosity, showering his love upon us and imparting his very presence within us. Christ penetrates his church with the generative seed of his Word and the life-giving presence of his Spirit, which takes root within her and grows to bring new life into the world.”
To compare the male orgasm – roundabout the simplest and most self-serving thing that a man or even a fifteen-year-old boy can do to please himself – to what Jesus did on the cross, calling men “extravagantly generous” for doing this, is ridiculous! As a believer in Jesus Christ, I’d even say it borders on blasphemy.
Moreover, how does this phallic worship affect the woman? If what men do in intercourse is a picture of God’s desire for us, then the woman with a headache is a picture of rejecting God, of making excuses not to follow a wise and loving Being whose plans are always best. If the presence of male ejaculation is analogous to the presence of God, women should be awed by semen, enlightened by semen, and changed fundamentally by semen, in a way somewhat analogous to how God changes His daughters and sons.
Even in a literal sense, his views do not describe semen well. Semen does not hold the ability to create in itself. The woman’s egg holds most of the genetic information, her body holds the child, and her body delivers and feeds the child. Is this a picture of God generously giving and us cooperating to bring forth a new creation, it implies God is a partner who does almost nothing and leaves all the work to us.
And where does this backwards analogy* leave single women like me? Do we stand for entirely Godless unbelievers?
This brings me to the female eldership point in my header: To really see this for what it is, you have to talk to the church in this alleged “picture of Christ and the church”. You may say they already did: Butler talked to plenty of men who are probably believers, working at The Gospel Coalition and Multnomah Publishers, and the Keller Centre. You are almost right. He was endorsed and promoted by plenty of men.
That is a problem, because men allegedly represent God in this picture, while women represent the Church. This book tries to tell the church what they can learn about God from looking at sexual intimacy. To do this, he needs to look at what women (the representatives of the church, in his picture) experience from intercourse. If women do not see the alleged self-sacrifice in men getting to orgasm, Butler and his ilk give a terrible picture of the gospel.
If Butler spoke to many Christian women while writing this, and let as many Christian women as men oversee, edit and approve of it before publishing, and if he respected the women’s views even more because they see the angle he is trying to use to teach what God is like, Josh Butler would probably have written a very different book. But herein lies the problem: Any preacher who publishes via the Gospel Coalition is a complementarian. They believe that women should not have the role of overseer, also known as an elder. Pastors who believe in not learning from women have, on a normal day, half of the church’s wisdom unavailable to them.
But in a case like this, it is even worse. Pastor Joshua Ryan Butler overlooks almost everyone who has firsthand experience of why this “icon” of his can be ridiculous or even blasphemous. He writes an entire book that immediately gets the wrong kind of buzz before release, causing endorsers**to retract their endorsements, unbelievers to take a swipe at the gospel, him removed from speaking at the IF Gathering this weekend, and many Christian writers to call his analogy just absolutely very badly problematic on several levels. Even the Gospel Coalition pulled their article.
TGC said it “lacked sufficient context”, and replaced the article with the entire first chapter that it came from. Reading the chapter does not make the excerpted article any better. If anything, it makes it worse. Example one: He quotes Sheila Wray Gregoire, but misses her entire point.
Example 2: The chapter proves how his analogy really does not deliver. This chapter has a few paragraphs on rape, followed by a few on prostitution. In order to denounce rape, Butler had to backtrack on his premise – he does not call sexual penetration giving when it is rape – he calls it taking. The very same activity can’t be called giving when it is wanted and taking when it is not. When the topic is prostitution, he backtracks on his analogy too: He admits prostituted women “are often pressured to do so by circumstances beyond their control”, but for his analogy, he describes the problem as women selling sex, not men buying it. For him, prostitution is a picture of an unfaithful church. If actual prostitution was the source for his analogy, it would lead to discussing a church that is sometimes unfaithful for reasons partly beyond its control, and in some cases completely hijacked to do traumatic things it never wanted, and which it could not be blamed for at all. Sex, or more accurately his sex analogies, does not “explain everything” – despite his book title.
Good intentions and bad theology, not combined with discussion with the believers who could enlighten him, combine here for an indefensible basic premise, and a book which, if chapter one is anything to go by, can’t deliver on its premise or promise.
*Backward analogy: This writer claims that sex is an analogy that pictures salvation. But sex presumably existed in Eden – before humans sinned and needed a Savior. I respond to another theologian with a similar assertion here.
**You may have noticed that one of the endorsement retractors, Dennae Piere, is a woman. This does not disprove my thesis on having women involved. She says she barely skimmed it and endorsed it based on what she previously saw of his work – she did not actually oversee the writing, nor had to approve of it, in the way several male theologians at Multnomah, The Keller Centre, and The Gospel Coalition had to.
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