I want to follow up on my post earlier today defending the Evangelical pastor Joshua Ryan Butler against uncharitable (to put it mildly) attacks on him for likening married sexuality to Christ’s relationship to the Church. If you haven’t yet read that one, go here to do so, then come back to read this post.
I’m revisiting it because I’m gathering, for my re-enchantment book, the notes I took while reading the Greek Orthodox theologian Timothy Patitsas’s book The Ethics Of Beauty. Re-reading the highlighted passages, I realized that Patitsas, and Orthodoxy, have a lot to say about this discussion.
Patitsas advocates what he calls a “beauty-first” approach to God. Basically, he says that we first approach God through Beauty, and follow our eros (desire) for Beauty to Goodness, and then to Truth itself. This, it seems to me, is what the late Benedict XVI meant when he said that the best arguments the Church has for the faith are the Beauty it produces, and the saints (that is, extraordinary goodness made incarnate).
[I’m not even sure why Butler’s thesis is at all controversial. Catholicism explicitly teaches that sacramental marriage is a model of Trinitarian life, and that sexual activity belongs entirely to that context because procreation is the clearest exercise of God’s creative image. This is Catholic 101-level teaching on family life, and why the Catholic Church remains opposed to sexual activity outside this model. I suspect that the attacks on this have less to do with Butler than it does in using him as a proxy to attack small-O orthodox Christianity. People are free to choose not to believe in it, but Christians should not be embarrassed or cowed into other beliefs, either. — Ed]
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