The Meaning of Singleness:
Retrieving an Eschatological Vision for the Contemporary Church
By Danielle Treweek
IVP Academic, 336 pages, $35
This important book by Danielle Treweek, a deacon in Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Australia, offers a foundational perspective for understanding singleness in the church. It deserves the attention it has already received in the evangelical parts of the oecumene; one hopes that it will receive attention everywhere.
The first step to understanding singleness today is to recognize the grip romanticism has upon marriage. The societal narrative is that marriage is where we are most fulfilled; it is where greatest happiness is to be found. Single people are defined negatively as unmarried, as not being something. (This view of marriage is of course ahistorical and it floats free of traditional commitments of children and indissolubility.) The Reformers contributed to this “romantic essentialization of marriage and family” (p. 29), leading to a Protestant “sentimental ideal” (p. 30) that Treweek documents from works by James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and others. The result is that single people are problematic to the contemporary church; they don’t conform to romantic, marital expectations.
Treweek diagnoses the attitude toward singleness of much contemporary Christianity: Singleness is deficient and aberrant, and single people are unfulfilled. In this part of her argument she struck me as unnecessarily harsh in her reading of Tim Keller and, in general, rather academically wooden. But she is spot-on when she notes the assumption that the sole, supreme form of relational fulfilment is to be found in marriage. Friendship is suspect not only in the world but in the church, because any close relationship is assumed to be sexual at some level.
Following this cultural and ecclesial history and contemporary diagnosis, Treweek prepares for her valuable work of reclamation. The Christian tradition has much positive to say about the value and character of singleness. She argues that in 1 Corinthians 7:7, Paul is not pointing to a special grace that allows some people to live without strong sexual drives. Rather, as Augustine will say, we have all (in Treweek’s words) “been given the will to obey divine commandments” (p. 66).
She turns to the magnificent work of Kyle Harper (From Shame to Sin, Harvard, 2013), who states that for Augustine “free will is an achieved state … rehabilitated by the mysterious power of divine grace. … The rise of the concept of free will and the sea change in the logic of sexual morality went hand in hand” (p. 67; from Harper, pp. 179–80, 118. Correction and emphasis mine). Singleness, with its embodiment of a Christian understanding of sexual restraint — Harper’s “sea change” — shows forth the continence and chastity that should be normative for all Christians. This is true whether it is a life state, a life calling, or a transitional state; all of us, of course, being single for at least part of our lives.
Treweek’s reclamation project proper begins with an extended study of virginity in Christian thought and practice from the early centuries forward. Some Christians held that sexual intercourse was a participation in the Fall: that marriage was a consolation that God allowed fallen humanity. Against them, Augustine held an “adamant prelapsarian position on marriage and sexuality,” a complex view that “marriage and sex [were] Edenic realities” while still holding “virginity [to be] eschatologically superior.” To hold that marriage was there in Eden before the Fall was, she said, “a seismic theological turning point” (p. 112). Indeed, Augustine’s thought perdures memorably in the Anglican marriage rite’s affirmation that marriage is “a solemn estate instituted by God in the time of man’s innocency” (That is, before the Fall).
Although the history is not monolithic regarding virginity, its importance throughout required an eschatological frame. Singleness qua virginity reminds us all of the final state of human beings in paradise. It instructs the church today; it is a prophetic sign. It is not properly understood as a sign of something lacking — for marriage (what singleness lacks) partakes of this world and not of the world to come. This role for singleness was significant in the church’s developing self-understanding. Influenced by Peter Brown, Treweek writes that “the so-called abnormality of the unmarried Christian life became the paradigm by which the believing community was uniquely and radically distinguished from the society around them” (p. 127). She quotes Brown drawing out the logic: “a society no longer held together by a sexual social contract was, in many ways a tabula rasa; it might regroup itself in a very different manner from that current in the surrounding world” (p. 127).
Treweek shows the contemporary discomfort with Matthew 22:23-33 (and parallels), as witnessed by the erasure of contemporary significance of the eschatological teaching that there is no marrying in the life to come. She does similar work with the latter part of 1 Corinthians 7. These two passages, historically, provided “a theologically thick and pastorally nourishing construct of the unmarried Christian life” (p. 162) and they need to be studied today, despite their implicit conflict with a romantic understanding of marriage.
Her theological retrieval chapter works with, again, Augustine, but also Aelfrik (a prolific English abbot at the turn of the first millennium), John Paul II, and Stanley Hauerwas. She clearly favors Aelfrik, although her presentations on the thought of the other three are fair and helpful; it is only her evaluations that I find strained at times. Worth particular note is her helpful articulation of John Paul’s framework of celibacy, part of his famous development of the theology of the body.
John Paul shows a number of ways that “the continent life ushers in the eschatological future.” First, the unmarried person has (in John Paul’s words) “an interior integration” that allows dedication to serve God’s kingdom “in all its dimensions.” Second, the virginal state “is a charismatic sign which announces that the teleological destiny of the body lies in glorification rather than the grave.” That is to say, “the unmarried life” does not merely “anticipate a new creation”; instead, it is (again John Paul’s words) “the beginning of the new creation … already at work for the total transformation of man” (p. 193. Emphasis original). For all the theologians she considers, although in different ways, singleness cannot be understood apart from eschatology.
All that I have written so far concerns the first three-fourths of her book. The final 25 percent, however, by itself would constitute a gem of a book. If this review has sparked a desire to read Treweek’s book, I suggest starting with chapter 9. Here the author shows with some subtlety the goal, theologically and ecclesiologically, of grasping the significance of singleness today: its distinction from marriage’s own eschatological orientation; the sociality of single people; the eschatological meaning of procreation; spiritual parenthood; relational sexuality; faithful friendship.
To take but one question: how, in the nitty-gritty of quotidian life, are celibate single people to understand sexual desire? Here Oliver O’Donovan arrives to be our dialogue partner. From an early essay on chastity to his mature reflections in Ethics and Theology, O’Donovan parses the differences of admiration and desire, deftly opening for us a place where admiration multiplies with the recognition of the good of creation while being distinct from desire as desire-for-myself.
Treweek has herself deftly opened in this book much of our humanity, a book which itself elicits admiration, thereby encouraging us to admire and desire the author of all good and beauty.
