#508: Apocalyptic (Circumstantial) Singleness and the Vision of God

Reading Dani Treweek and John Paul II on singleness.

MLA: I was at the Evangelical Theological Society earlier this week to give a paper putting Dani Treweek’s compelling book on singleness in dialogue with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. For those who are reading with me through the latter, this will give you a teaser of what’s to come.

This is a long essay, and my thoughts on singleness here are provisional and exploratory. It is an attempt to address the question that Dani admirably forces on evangelicals, namely, how do we understand circumstantial singleness theologically? By no means do I think I have said all that can be said—and much of what I do say simply recapitulates Dani’s own view, in different words.

As always, I welcome feedback. Scroll to the bottom for updates on what else I have been up to.

I. Thinking about Singleness

How should churches in the West think about singleness in light of its growing prevalence in our societies? As Dani Treweek suggests at the outset of her excellent volume The Meaning of Singleness, “Christian discussions of the unmarried life” have historically described its theological and pastoral significance with reference to categories like “virginity, celibacy, abstinence, widowhood, divorce, betrothal, and even occasionally eunuchdom.”¹ Though precise, such categories offer little positive theological substance to those who, through circumstance or chance, find themselves midway through the course of their lives unmarried.

Though Catholic accounts of vowed celibacy and monastic institutions might tempt Protestants who are looking for resources to navigate the growth of singleness, Treweek is skeptical such approaches offer adequate theological resources for the circumstantially single. On her view, “singleness’ intrinsic sacramental character is not ultimately predicated on the integrity of the individual’s will or intention, nor the formality of their vowmaking.” Instead, regardless of whether singleness is undertaken “willingly or unwillingly, by choice or circumstance…each and every unmarried Christian’s situation is embedded with the essential honor of bearing witness to a vitally important aspect of God’s teleological purposes for humanity as they have already been, and will finally be, accomplished in Christ.”²

Treweek’s eschatologically-centered account of singleness resists the instrumentalization that the special, unique renunciation of marriage that vowed or intentional celibacy seems to entail. Instead, she proposes that “faithful Christian singleness is always theologically significant…because of that to which it points and that by which it is empowered.” The single person who remains open to marriage is no different, theologically speaking, than the celibate Christian who has vowed to live that way in perpetuity. While the unmarried state is a sign and signifier of the eschatological life, on Treweek’s view the “the eschatologically significant single Christian who lives for the kingdom is, quite simply, the faithful single Christian who lives in light of that same kingdom.”³

Treweek’s concern to develop an account of singleness within a distinctly Protestant theology of vocation is commendable, as is her wariness about the various ways the so-called “gift” of celibacy has been metastasized into a voluntary assumption of a heroic, self-abnegating office based on discerning a special call from God. She is dubious that Jesus’ claim in Matthew 19:12 that some “have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” can be rightly conscripted into a theology of intentional celibacy, as the verse instead names those who have refrained from remarriage after divorce for the sake of the “kingdom of heaven.”⁴

At the same time, her effort to flatten out the theological differences between intentional and circumstantial singleness raises hard questions about the will’s role in signifying the eschatological state. The intentionally celibate person not only embraces their temporary celibacy, but commits to remain in it and forsake the good of marriage—while the occasionally single person allows their will to remain open to marriage, should circumstances in the future prove fortuitous. While Treweek is indisputably right that both the circumstantially single and the vowed celibate can equally live “for the kingdom” and so to that extent bear witness to the goods of our eschatological life, whether they live so in the same manner or way, and what hangs on it, is one question her book opens but does not resolve.

Here I want to consider whether Protestants can retrieve a theology of intentional celibacy in dialogue with the premier twentieth-century Catholic theological account of marriage and celibacy, Pope John Paul II’s magisterial Theology of the Body. Treweek is right that John Paul’s work has little to offer for understanding the theological value (if any) of occasional or circumstantial forms of singleness. However, John Paul II’s construal of the eschatological life as one in which our lives are consummated by the visio Dei, the vision of God, not only offers a way of articulating the unique theological significance of vowed celibacy but has resources to construct a spiritual pedagogy for the circumstantially single. As those who are caught between the two worlds of their singleness and a possible marriage, the circumstantially single reveal the fundamental and basic human condition prior to the second advent of Christ more than those who are intentionally celibate.

As Treweek notes, any Protestant attempt at theological retrieval must regard Scripture not as an encumbrance that would hinder us from frolicking in the fields of historical theology, but as an authoritative well from which retrieval must begin and to which any retrieval must be accountable. This is certainly true when Protestants read and appreciate Popes.

In this case, I will suggest that John Paul’s construal of celibacy as an anticipatory participation in the visio Dei is commensurate with Paul the Apostle’s contention in 1 Corinthians 7:32-35 that those who are married are divided, while those who are unmarried are not—a stance that is intelligible only when single people’s attention and focus eclipses marriage and renders it no longer an option.

II. John Paul II’s Eschatological Celibacy

To understand John Paul II’s account of the eschatological significance of the celibate life, we must begin with his construal of the body’s nuptial significance in creation and his corresponding emphasis on the primacy of choice and the will for the significance of human action. In his treatment of the creation account, Genesis 2:23 and 24 are interlinked, such that the man’s leaving of father and mother in order to become “one flesh” with his wife recapitulates the man’s original recognition of the woman as “flesh of my flesh.” In receiving the woman, the original Adam is lifted out of his basic solitude before God. In that solitude, the man learns both the nature of his humanity and the significance of his body.

On the one hand, he is confronted with the task of naming the animals, which shapes his self-consciousness as a human being made in the image of God. On the other hand, he is given the commandment to not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil lest he die, and so is given a glimpse of the body’s eschatological orientation: the command confronts him with a choice between an immortal obedience or mortal rebellion. Out of the “mature consciousness of the body” that the Adam gains through this solitude, he is prepared to elect to embrace the woman in freedom. While the man is bound to his parents by nature, he chooses to leave such bonds behind and unite with his wife. This free, consenting choice fulfills what John Paul calls the “spousal meaning of the body,” which is the sincere and disinterested gift of the person to another in love.

This free gift of the self to another arises, though, out of the vision that each party has of the other. The original couple, Genesis 2:25 tells us, were “naked and not ashamed.” Though the primary meaning of our original nakedness is doubtlessly anatomical, John Paul II suggests it also carries a deeper meaning of the goodness of God’s vision of humanity. Before the first couple is free to behold each other without shame, they live coram Deo, before the eyes of God. Their mutual, shameless gazing on each other’s flesh participates in God’s vision: they see each other as God sees them. The innocence of the original couple’s vision is the fruit of their inner purity, their lack of concupiscence: it arises from their hearts, in other words, and enables and empowers them to give themselves to the other in mutual and reciprocal freedom. This “interior gaze” is the basis and grounds on which they know each other as persons, and in a sense precedes, encompasses, and goes beyond their sexual embrace. In our post-lapsarian world, the self-mastery of continence as a means of preserving a robust freedom of the heart becomes central to a Theology of the Body: it occupies the largest section of John Paul’s work and (crucially) precedes his teaching on celibacy.

Already we can see the outlines of how John Paul II’s eschatological account of celibacy might proceed. If the marital and spousal were the body’s basic and fundamental meanings, then it might be difficult to escape framing celibacy as anything other than a secondary option. However, John Paul is explicit that the Adam’s solitude before God indicates his need for a ‘communion of persons’ that goes deeper than marriage. As he says, “Marriage and procreation do not definitively determine the original and fundamental meaning of being a body nor of being, as a body, male and female.” Rather, they ”only give concrete reality to that meaning in the dimensions of history.” The body’s eschatological significance is indicated first by the shadow of death that God’s command casts, which comes prior to the creation of woman and the establishment of marriage. As such, the body’s “spousal” meaning is perfected and completed within the more fundamental and fundamentally celibate “communion of persons.”⁵

The fulfillment of this ‘communion of persons’ is constituted by our enjoyment of God’s life through the visio Dei, the vision of God. On one side, the resurrection means the physical body will be brought into a new and perfect submission to the (Holy) Spirit, ensuring that the continence that disordered desire has made difficult and which is essential to our free gift of our self to another will be a permanent and inalienable feature of our lives.⁶ On the other side, the divinization of humanity through our communion of God happens when we behold God through God’s gift of self-communication to the whole of the “human’s psychosomatic subjectivity.”⁷

This self-giving at the heart of the visio Dei is both mutual and expansive: as God gives himself to humanity in the visio Dei, humanity is empowered through grace to give ourselves to God—and, as the perfection of our humanity requires the communion of persons, we are empowered by our communion with God to realize the “communion of saints” that falls under the same article of the Apostles Creed as the “resurrection of the body.”

John Paul’s stress on the visio Dei as the eschatological perfection of humanity is his answer to how the “spousal” meaning of the body can be “virginal,” given that there is neither marrying nor being given in marriage in our final state. The nuptial meaning of the body is not abrogated in the eschaton, but is brought to its consummation through the intensity of our concentration and vision on God. The original man and woman’s freedom to give themselves to the other in the Garden arises from the purity of their vision, in which they are “naked and not ashamed.” John Paul’s framing of that nakedness as a participation in the ‘vision of God’ anticipates the perfection of our vision in the eschaton. The self-giving love that takes shape in marriage is the same self-giving love that eschatological celibacy reveals—only the latter is more intense, more focused, and less divided precisely because it is marked by beholding God immediately, in Himself, rather than in the mediated way that being bound to creation in marriage entails. As John Paul writes, the “vision of God ‘face to face’” means “a love of such depth and power of concentration on God himself will be born in the person that it completely absorbs the person’s whole psychosomatic subjectivity.”⁸ In this way, the “spousal” significance of the body is “virginal.”

But if the “spousal” significance of the body is “virginal” in the eschaton, then the virginal significance of the body in the time of creation is—spousal. John Paul II is unequivocal that celibate continence “the fruit of a charismatic choice,” a gift which is given to some and not to all single people. As a sign of the coming kingdom of God, vowed celibacy both “indicates” and “anticipates” the future resurrection. While John Paul II parts ways with those exegetes who think the “eunuch” in Matthew 19:12 is someone who is responding appropriately to a divorce, he also points to both Jesus’ celibacy and Mary and Joseph’s perpetual virginity as models of the singular and unique continence “for the kingdom of heaven” to which celibates are called.⁹

Insofar as celibates bear witness to the eschatological life, they uniquely underscore the “revelation of the spousal relationship between Christ and the church,” which gives their celibacy a nuptial character. Negatively, celibacy for the kingdom of heaven means the renunciation of marriage and so a stable, intentional embrace of solitude. Positively, celibacy for the kingdom of heaven means that the single person “may give himself totally to Christ.”¹⁰

In this way, the renunciation of marriage happens, paradoxically, on marital grounds: in saying “no” to the spousal union with another person, the celibate says “yes” to a sincere gift of themselves to God and to so embodying the spousal—and virginal—love of Christ for the church. In practicing continency for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, the celibate person practices the “interior gaze” that the “vision of God” perfects and so begins to embody, in a provisional and very imperfect way, the communion of persons that we will all enjoy in the eschatological life.

For understanding vowed celibacy, then, much depends on whether the concentration of vision on God that we will enjoy in the eschaton requires actively renouncing marriage—or whether such a commitment is equally possible so long as marriage remains a real and definite possibility for a person’s life. As John Paul develops 1 Corinthians 7, he suggests that marriage in one sense “closes oneself” into a transitory world, precisely by binding us to a form of life that is “passing away.” By contrast, abstaining from marriage “liberates from such necessity.”¹¹ As the one who marries “finds himself divided” (1 Cor. 7:34), the unmarried person “should be characterized by an inner integration, by a unification that would allow him to devote himself completely to the service of the kingdom of God in all its dimensions.”¹² Without this inner integration, which cultivates the celibate person’s concentration of affection, mind, and action on the kingdom of God, “division” can enter into the unmarried person’s life and leave them suspended over a void without either a commitment to marriage or a “clear goal on the basis of which he should renounce marriage.”¹³

John Paul II’s account of celibacy doubtlessly prioritizes vowed, intentional forms of singleness—but it also raises important questions for how Treweek develops her account of non-celibate singleness. Treweek notes that Ephesians 5 indicates that marriage anticipates the eschaton and the union of Christ and the church. On her view, marriage foreshadows our union with Christ, while the unmarried life gives us a foretaste of it. Singleness is a “literal proleptic participation in the intra-human relational bonds of siblinghood that will actually be continued in eternity.” Though it might seem ironic, the unmarried form of life “most closely resembles the intrapersonal character of the heavenly bride.”¹⁴ So far so good.

Yet while Treweek wants to endorse the eschatological significance of singleness without requiring a vowed or intentional dimension to it, her approach eclipses the marital character of the church’s eschatological life. In John Paul’s account, marriage and celibacy mutually disclose what the other is and shape our imaginations accordingly: celibacy is marital even as marriage has a virginal dimension, not only prior to it but within it. Marriage requires a regular renunciation of sexual desire, not only to cultivate continence and self-mastery but for their own sake but to orient the married couple’s vision toward the visio Dei that they will someday enjoy. Paul cautions married couples to not deprive each other except by mutual consent so that they can devote themselves to prayer—a qualification that presupposes that they ought to occasionally so deprive themselves. As Treweek observes, Protestants have paid far too little attention to Paul’s shocking claim in 1 Corinthians 7:29 that, in light of the eschaton, those who have wives ought to live as though they had none. And, conversely, celibacy has a marital inflection: the undivided attention that Paul speaks of necessarily excludes other unions, in the same manner that a marital vow to a person necessarily excludes similar attentions being given to others.

III. Apocalyptic Singleness

Is there anything constructive to say about circumstantial singleness in light of the Pope’s framework, though, and what might Protestants learn from it? In the first place, framing the eschatological life around the visio Dei enables us to cultivate an ascetical pedagogy for all single people, in which the freedom to give ourselves to others emerges from the purification of our desires that happens in contemplation of the Word. Chastity emerges out of the soul’s concentration on the beauty of God. Whether intentionally single or only contingently so, the ascesis of desire that comes through single-minded, wholehearted concentration on God is in fact available to every single person, even if one does not opt to embody the nuptial significance of the church’s eschatological life through committing to remain continent in perpetuity. (Treweek advances something like this view, even if in different terms.)

In this way, we might frame circumstantial singleness undertaken “for the sake of the kingdom of God” through the lens of a momentary, apocalyptic disclosure of the “communion of saints” which will be perfected in the eschaton—whereas intentional celibacy is governed by an intention to embody eschatological life in its fullness within history. The circumstantially single and intentionally celibate are equal in their openness and concentration on God in the present—but they have different postures toward their futures. Insofar as there are conditions under which the circumstantially single would marry, they incorporate those conditions as part of their intentions and their wills and form their own sense of vocation and aspirations accordingly. Their disposition toward marriage is not one of renunciation, but of temporary abstention: they welcome their singleness insofar as God providentially brings it about, but resist insofar as marriage remains within the scope of their desires and plans.

This inherent contradiction about their future will divide their attention and focus only to the extent that their attention and presence reaches into the future: the more they concentrate themselves on meeting God here and now, and allowing tomorrow’s troubles to remain in the future where they belong, the more they can embody an undivided will. If they cannot embody the nuptial significance of the church’s life through intentionally foreclosing the future, they can still display the beauty of God’s holiness through the purity of their charity and the intensity of their vision of God. While those who are married ought live “as if” they were not married, then, perhaps those who are circumstantially single ought live “as if” they will never be married—even while maintaining their openness to being so, at some point, if the Lord so wills.

It is important to stress the extent to which this ascesis for circumstantial singleness in the church contradicts the deep formative effects of a world that has made marriage increasingly unintelligible. Economic and structural transformations of Western societies over the past twenty years are, I think, largely responsible for the rapid growth of circumstantial singleness. Those changes have been predicated on an economy that compels us to mortgage our futures for the sake of satisfying our immediate desires. (The willingness to sacrifice the present for the sake of the future at the heart of the climate change debates is the most prominent secular reaction against this trend.)

An economy that concentrates our vision on the immediate present will eclipse marriage and the genealogy it perpetuates, which are the primary answer to who will bury us when we die: marriage and children bind us to time, even the time after we are gone. The church is no substitute for this reality: in 1 Timothy 5, Paul distinguishes between those widows who are ‘real’ and those who have surviving descendants who might supply care to them. The present to which single Christians attend must be the present of God’s disclosure and action, rather than the present of their own satisfaction and desires. Only in this way their singleness be fertile and equip the church to bury those members who will, when time comes, need it because they lack their own lineage.

Articulating singleness in terms of the apocalyptic disclosure of God’s immediate presence to the world—as Treweek admirably does, even if not even in these terms—does not resolve the inherent division in the will that remaining open to and interested in marriage creates. Yet it does offer a way of crystallizing the basis and grounds on which single people would enter into marriage: while the joy of companionship, solitude, and other creational dimensions might play some role in their decision-making, an apocalyptically single life that is wholly concentrated on the visio Dei in the present must heed Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 7:39 that widows who marry should do so only “in the Lord.” Such a constraint need not be ethereal or angelic, as though it were entirely disconnected from the comfort of creaturely companionship. But it does underscore the possibility of a reconfigured set of priorities from those that are common within our consumeristic societies, as the cultivation of a home and family life is now a net financial negative. (In our day, those who are tempted by wealth like the widows Paul speaks of in 1 Timothy 5:11 are more apt to not marry and have children.)  

Such a construal—which is really just Treweek’s in so many words—offers a distinctively Protestant caution against over-immanentizing, and so over-institutionalizing the eschatological life—as happens not only with Roman Catholic construals of celibacy, but also with Papal infallibility and transubstantiation. In their refusal to resolve the division of the will, those who are circumstantially single for the sake of the kingdom of heaven offer a glimpse of the eschatological life where it is otherwise hidden, veiled in the same manner of a church on pilgrimage through the barren desert of this world. The triumphalistic, eschatological resolution of such divisions will remain an ongoing temptation, precisely because the burdens that come from remaining suspended between two worlds is so peculiar. For this reason, we ought not regard those who embrace intentional celibacy as having done something wrong—but only as having taken up an alternate form of life, with different and unique theological resonances and pastoral temptations.¹⁵

At the same time, Protestants should remain haunted by John Paul II’s defense of vowed celibacy for Protestant reasons, namely, that it names features of Scripture that our communities have obscured or de-emphasized. While marriage’s status as a sign and symbol of God’s marital, covenantal love for His people is widely proclaimed, Christ’s vocation as a single man cannot be fully understood except through this lens.

The bridal and maternal dimensions of the church were mostly eclipsed at the Reformation, alongside the rejection of the nuptial dimensions of celibacy and singleness—which are present not only in Augustine, but in other early church fathers. If single people bear witness to the church’s union with Christ in the eschaton, then it is eminently plausible to think their witness has a nuptial dimension that warrants excluding marriage as those who marry exclude other partners, as Christ’s life does and as Paul’s witness clearly does. While there is no need to embrace orders or the structure of merit and superiority that have accompanied them, Protestants might well need to learn to shape young people’s theological imaginations in such a way that intentional celibacy becomes a meaningful and, even, attractive option.

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Around the Web

I moderated this discussion with Jonathan Tran, Sarah Coakley and Vincent Lloyd about ‘racial capitalism.’ It was spicy, in the best sense: much was said that made me think a great deal.

A reminder that Called into Questions exists. I have received very little feedback about the book yet, unfortunately, but the few reviews that have been posted seem generally happy with it.

Speaking of, I thought the episode we did for Mere Fidelity about it was one of our best. The conversation we had about the Israel/Hamas war was also excellent, I thought.

The Penultimate Word

“We have no reason to despair, then: rather must we with great confidence take it for granted that, if he is with us on earth through charity, we are, through the same charity, with him in heaven. We have explained to you how he is so truly present with us on earth that he could shout from heaven, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? although Saul was not touching him in any way and could not even see him. But what about the other side of it? How can it be proved that we are with him in heaven? The same apostle, Paul, demonstrates it, for he says, If you have risen with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Have a taste for the things that are above, not the things on earth; for you are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Col 3:1-3) Both things are quite evident, therefore: he is still down here, and we are already up there. He is down here by compassionate charity, and we are on high by hopeful charity, for in hope we have been saved (Rom 8:24). But because our hope, even though it bears upon the future, is absolutely certain, Paul’s statement is made about us as though it were realized already.” — Augustine

1. Treweek, Meaning of Singleness, 3.

2. Treweek, 233.

3. Treweek, 199.

4. Cf. Treweek, page 198.

5. John Paul II, 69:5, page 399.

6. Cf. John Paul III, 66. 5, 67.1. Spiritualization signifies that the spirit “will also fully permeate the body and the powers of the spirit will permeate the energies of the body.”

7. John Paul II, 67:2, 392.

8. John Paul II, 68:3, 395.

9. John Paul II, 75:3 and 75:4, 420-21.

10. John Paul II, 80:7, 439.

11. John Paul II, 85:2, 454.

12. John Paul II, 84:2, 450.

13. John Paul II, 84:2, 450-451.

14. Treweek, 232.

15. As Treweek notes, it is “undoubtedly true that certain distinctions—even vocational distinctions—can and should exist between the situation of an individual who has intentionally undertaken to pursue lifelong singleness, and that of one who has found themselves single (or single again) despite a desire to pursue the contrary.” (275)