The gospel, sexual desire and the abuse scandals in the church. What has the erotic to do with God?

The resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury has highlighted the horrendous nature of abuse in the church and also the church’s difficulties in dealing with these individuals. But is focusing on individuals enough or trying to address these matters through safeguarding and moral injunctions?

Those elements are no doubt necessary. But I think also not sufficient. 

Recent events have reminded me of the extreme naivety around sex that exists in conservative Evangelical circles. And no doubt in other contexts as well.

That can conceal deviant behaviour but is also a failure to understanding the nature of gospel, in my view.

In these thoughts, I explore how in mystical Christian traditions, as well as those with an interest in inner life and the path to God, the erotic is understood as a key mode of awakening and energy. For if sex is about wanting to have and be had by another, that is but a reflection of the yearning to be one with God, the true promise of the gospel: “oneing” with the divine, as Mother Julian and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing put it.

I turn to the insights of Plato, Origen, Dante and William Blake to draw out these themes. And also consider the parables of Jesus and his encounters with various individuals in the gospels as expressions of this deeper yearning, which he seems to have released in them and which might be foster in us, too - with discernment, honesty and wisdom.

0:00 My experience of Christian evangelical camps
2:50 Sex as a symptom of erotic desire for God
6:05 Plato’s insights about the body and why that is discarded
11:09 Origen on God’s kisses
14:09 The mystics understanding of “Onening”
15:05 Dante’s transformation of his desire for Beatrice
17:05 Blake on the erotic discovery that all things are holy
21:05 The erotic in the gospels and the notion of philia
21:40 Jesus’s encounters and his parables as desire for God
29:26 The abuse crises call for a lost Christianity