Explainer

Creed

Wisdom

14 March 2023

3 min read

Discover the seen and unseen

What does it all look like in the light? The vision for Seen & Unseen.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The IRAM 30-meter telescope under the night sky.

IRAM-gre, via Wikimedia Commons

As someone once said, everyone has an angle, so it's a fair enough question to ask what our angle is.

In 325 AD a conference of bishops, many of whom carried in their bodies the scars of persecution, met in a small town called Nicaea in what is now northern Turkey. They slowly hammered out a visionary statement that described what the early Christians believed - a whole new way of looking at the world based around the belief that God the Creator had entered the world in the person of a Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth.

That document, commonly known as the Nicene Creed, is the one Creed that is accepted and used across the entire Christian Church, so it’s good enough for us.

Our conviction, however, is that this framework, rather than closing down thinking, opens up a much more expansive and energising space for thought and acting than secular visions can offer.

For example, the Nicene Creed also describes God as the maker of all things, 'seen and unseen', picking up a phrase St Paul had written three hundred years before. We thought that summed up pretty well what we're about - we're interested in the Seen - what we all know and talk about all the time - economics, politics, society, law, the arts, the planet and its future - but also the Unseen realities that make sense of the seen - the mysterious, the numinous, the reality of the spiritual realm, the kingdom of heaven.

This Christian framework is not one that can be simply tacked onto a secular mindset but is a different way of viewing the world. Therefore, our aim is not to debate with those who don't share our faith as to who can prove their case, but to do our best to describe the world as Christians (of many kinds and perspectives) see it. Our task on this website is not to answer simplistic questions with simplistic answers, but to ask ourselves and others: what do politics, economics, the arts, technology, biology, leisure, geography, housing - in other words everything - look like in the light of the coming of Jesus into the world. And if we can do that well, we can be both a window and mirror to the societies we live in.

We believe there is wisdom in the two thousand years of Christian reflection on what it means to be human, and what it means to be good - on God, nature, community, work, and everything else - wisdom that has been discarded too quickly in western societies. We also think that the rapid discarding of Christian faith, and the failure to replace it with any kind of convincing common story is a disaster for our culture, leaving it open to fragmentation and culture warfare. Not that we’re advocating a return to Christendom - the Church made too many mistakes for misty-eyed nostalgia about that. But we do think Christian faith has the intellectual and spiritual depth to help renew and revive cultures today. Whether it does or not is beyond our pay-grade. Our job is just to tell the story as best we can.

Christians think a great deal about their faith and the cultures in which they live. Yet much of that wisdom is locked up inside long books that few people read. We want to make that wisdom accessible to a much wider audience. So, what you'll find here is material that is thoughtful, accessible to non-specialists, the fruit of deep thinking both about the Christian tradition and contemporary life, and can help you not only think more clearly, but live a better life.  

We may critique ideas, but will try not to attack people. We want to be generous, curious, confident about the faith, open to criticism and new ideas, intelligent, accessible, and patient. We don't want to be competitive, aggressive, reactive, fearful, or closed-minded.

Read our articles. Listen to our podcasts. Expand your thinking. Feed and satisfy your curiosity. Discover a world that is greater, more full of meaning and sense than you ever imagined.  

Explainer

Creed

Seven Deadly Sins

Sin

31 July 2023

6 min read

Lust: disordered desire

In the fourth of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, Belle Tindall explores how Lust minimises or sensationalises sex and desire.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

In the Emmy-nominated HBO show, White Lotus, we’re introduced to three generations of a glamorous Italian-American family: F Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli and Adam DiMarco play a grandfather, father, and son, two of whom are in an ever-present battle with a sex addiction. Lust has made a home in this family, it has dug out and paved its own neuropathways, and ultimately blown these people apart. Scene after scene, we witness these men pathologically view women as nothing more than bodies to conquer, much to their own despair. You could say that Lust is the unseen, unspoken, yet undeniable villain of the entire series. We witness it obliterate relationships of all kinds and ultimately make way for danger and death to ensue.

It’s a masterful case-study in how destructive of a force Lust can be when left unchecked, not only to the objectified, but also to the one who can’t help but do the objectifying.

I conducted a little experiment in preparation for writing this piece, I asked five friends of mine who would not, and never have, identified as Christians, for the three things that they most associate with Christianity.

Out of those five people, four of them mentioned Christianity’s rather peculiar sexual ethics. Now, I know that as far as research goes, this isn’t the most scientific finding. But it is telling. An article on lust may just be the least surprising thing one could find on a magazine site that offers ‘Christian perspectives on just about everything’. In popular culture and common thought, Christianity is to sex is what Jamie Oliver is to sugary drinks: an almighty party-pooper, a tiresome force that is out to spoil everybody’s fun. That’s largely a result of Christian sexual ethics being reduced to a set of repressive ‘don’ts.’

Don’t have casual sex, or any kind of sex outside of the confines of marriage, for that matter.
Don’t watch pornography
Don’t explore self-sex
Don’t talk about it
Don’t think about it

Just don’t.

As such, Christianity’s view of sex has been regarded as square or prudish at best, and oppressive and cruel at worst. And here you are, having stumbled upon an article which is about to place Lust back in its familiar old ‘deadly sin’ category. Ground-breaking, I hear you cry.

Well, allow me the pleasure of beginning this piece by saying something that is less predictable: Lust is not interchangeable with sexual desire. The two are not one and the same.

Sex is good. Very good, in fact.

According to the book of Genesis, the book that acts as the Bible’s start-line, it is one of the first instructions ever given to humanity. It’s an apparent component of our purpose (pre- ‘original sin’, might I add). We’re told to go ahead and multiply, to increase in number, to have sex. But it doesn’t end there. If it did, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Bible presents sex in purely practical and procreational terms. But, not so. From one biblical poem to another – this time, the Song of Songs. This book is nothing short of erotic literature, it is a fully-fledged sex-scene. The composition and inclusion of this book speaks volumes, it does away with the notion that sexual pleasure and desire are some kind of inherent evil. On the contrary, if it’s a biblical perspective that you’re after, here it is: sex was designed by God and gifted to humanity. For procreation, yes. But also, for pleasure, intimacy, and well-being.

So, in summary: sex is a gift, a very good one at that.

With that firmly in mind, let’s return to Lust. If Lust is not sexual desire, per se, what exactly is it?

It is a perception of sex, and a corresponding desire for it, that has been either minimised or sensationalised. Sex is a gift, that is the Christian insight at least, but Lust wants to blur your vision, it wants you to believe that sex is either more or less than a good gift. Lust seeks to disorder your desire.

To only desire one third of a person, to regard them exclusively as a body, is to undermine their full personhood.

The belief that sex is inherently meaningless, that it can be devoid of any kind of sacred or unique value, often acts as a wide-open door to Lust. It is also the predisposition that tends to normalise Lust, allowing it to hide in plain sight. That is, until it has damaged us and/or others. Lust tells us that we can obtain a person’s body, without paying any heed to the rest of them. It lessens them in our sight, it reduces them, it de-humanises them. This may sound a little dramatic, but if we are the sum of our bodies, our minds, and our souls – then to only desire one third of a person, to regard them exclusively as a body, is to undermine their full personhood.

A more subtle, yet just as pervasive, form of a disordered sexual desire would be to regard sex as more than a gift, to sensationalise it, to mistake it for love. Lust’s other tactic is to suggest that sexual activity is tantamount to value. It seeks to convince us that to be sexually desired is to be appreciated, and being sexually active must equate to being actively loved. Lust wrongly offers us sex as a source of worth, affirmation, and significance. In such cases, we may not be regarding someone as a means to a physical end, so much as a means to an emotional one.

Whether its tactic is to minimise or aggrandise, Lust whispers in our ear, encouraging us to regard another person as an object to possess, a tool of gratification. All the while, telling us that it doesn’t matter, because sex doesn’t matter.

As is the case with all of the deadly sins, it’s not that you possess them, as much as they begin to possess you. Lust can be a demanding master, indeed. Insatiable, even. And indescribably harmful.

The demand for restraint on the part of the powerful, purely for the protection of the poor and the vulnerable was nothing short of jaw-dropping.

Lust has much to answer for. In its darkest and most insidious extremity, often intertwined with toxic perceptions of power, Lust has led to atrocities being committed against people who were ever-so-wrongly treated as objects.

There is a reason that Lust is regarded as ‘deadly’.

Tom Holland recalls that in Graeco-Roman households, for example, it was utterly taken for granted that the bodies of enslaved people were objects to be possessed, owned, and utilised for physical gratification. In fact, Holland recounts how their bodies were spoken of in the same terms as urinals. People were regarded as nothing more than literal places/products for their masters to relieve themselves.

When placed in this context, the sexual ethics that were being adopted by early Christians were radical, not square. The very idea that there was something morally good about standing up against the whisperings of Lust was unheard of. The demand for restraint on the part of the powerful, purely for the protection of the poor and the vulnerable was nothing short of jaw-dropping. Historians note that as the Christian movement began to bubble up, so did a rather radical sexual revolution.

Not quite so Jamie Oliver-esque after all.

This revolution was fuelled by the idea of imago Dei, the notion that every person was made in the very image of the one who did the making. Therefore, every person is worthy of being treated as such, of being afforded unconditional dignity and worth, of being acknowledged for the uniquely valuable individual that they are. It was also, in part, a defiant re-enchanting of sex; it was a bold reminder that sex was always supposed to be healthy, enriching and inherently good. That it is precious and fragile, and therefore needs to be guarded with the utmost care. Such notions leave very little room for the reductive tendencies of Lust. Christianity, in its very essence, wages a war on such things.

This is not to say that Christians have won such a war, nor have they always fought this war well. To say so would be telling only half of the story, and do a significant disservice to those, for example, who have had shame heaped upon them in the name of purity culture (ironically, a culture which was/is also fuelled by reducing a person to the sum of their body parts).

But the war itself is one that is still worth fighting, surely? For the sake of others, ourselves, and sex itself.