This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow,
as night the day, thou canst not then be false with any man.
–William Shakespeare

Since writing my critiques of Purity Culture, I’ve spent the past few months thinking about what a positive, healthy purity ethic might look like.

The main flaw of Purity Culture I’ve seen is its over-emphasis on Not Doing Things; ie.not having pre-marital sex, not dressing in a provocative manner, not kissing until your wedding day, not dating, etc. etc.

But is purity merely the absence of certain things? Or is it also the intentional and daily-practice of Something?

I believe purity–in order to truly be a virtue–is based on positive action sourced from an internally consistent framework of principles. In this sense, couldn’t we say purity is similar to integrity in that it means acting in accordance with a set of core values?

If purity is a virtue, then it is not merely the abstaining from certain activities, ie. dressing in a particular way or adhering to a set of external rules–mainly because these are arbitrary standards which vary from group to group and are subject to change; sometimes on the whim of whomever is in charge at the time.

This is why, for example, when I was growing up there were fluctuations between what was considered a modest skirt–some said ankle-length, others said hitting below the knee.

But purity–as a virtue and as an ethic–is far more than dress and behavior codes.

In fact, I would say purity should not be limited to our sexual expression but ought to connote an entire purity of person, a way of being that extends to whole of our humanness. 

Indeed, I think we could say that truly pure people are mindful about everything in their lives: what and how much they eat, how many resources they consume, their dealings with others, how they speak, how they treat themselves and how they treat others, how they conduct business transactions and maybe even what kind of car they drive.

It’s tragic that purity has come to be almost exclusively identified with sexuality rather than as a whole-person approach to living.

Because by relegating purity to merely our sexuality, we set ourselves up for hypocrisy, duplicity and ultimately, dehumanization.  Indeed, the unintended consequence of focusing exclusively on “sexual purity” is a fragmentation of our being. Anytime we elevate, idolize or excessively focus on one part of our humanity we fragment ourselves and thus, deny the wholeness of our personhood.

Which is to say, anyone can conform to external standards of dress and behavior but that does not mean the person is pure–because purity is so much more than wearing a baggy, denim jumper or slapping on a “True Love Waits” wristband.

True purity is integrated into to every part of our humanity and that is far more difficult to practice.

Ultimately, what destroys purity/wholeness is living in a fragmented, compartmentalized, duplicitous way.

Sometimes people ask me if I’ve ever discussed standards of modesty and appropriate sexual behavior with my teenage daughter. I never really had a good answer for that because the reality is that we discuss sexuality within the context of our whole lives. I don’t need to “set apart time for the sex talk” because I am living in active relationship with my daughter and as issues arise and the need presents itself, we have a conversation about it. Then again, this applies to every part of our lives together and not merely sexuality.

I mean, it would be downright awkward, completely inauthentic and probably harmful for me to suddenly announce that we’re having “The Talk.” I believe it’s more true to the wholeness of our humanity to simply allow these discussions to take place as naturally and easily as possible.

And yet, it is so tempting to fragment our whole humanness, in fact, I would say we are prone to compartmentalize. We may even WANT to fragment ourselves because then it’s easier to create rules, laws and codes for ourselves and others. And once we create rules, it’s easy to determine who is in and who is out.

But the true ethic of purity comes from within, from the heart–too bad only God can see that!

Purity is living wholly–in all areas of my life. It starts with me. I must ask myself: am I taking care of myself? Am I taking drugs? Am I drinking too much? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I over-eating? Am I getting enough exercise? Am I expressing my sexuality in a way that honors the wholeness of who I am?

Purity is knowing myself and honoring the whole of my personhood–because once I know myself, I am living honestly. I am living in truth. Purity is wholeness.

I

Maybe a month ago I am at a Bible study hosted by a handful of people I have come to love very much.

There is a moment when it is off-handedly offered that someone read recently in an article that biblical translators, facing difficulty in communicating with inuit peoples in Alaska, were having to be creative in translating some of the Bible’s phrases for a people group with no context to otherwise receive them.

What does Lamb of God mean to someone who has never seen or heard of a lamb, who has no concept of a lamb?

The translators settled on seal.

The Seal of God.

Seals are defenceless, as close to a sacrificial creature as the inuit group in question comes to understanding.

This fact comes up in the first place because we are discussing 1 Peter and have come to the verse about Satan being a roaming lion, another animal the inuit people did not have a concept of, so the translators had rendered it polar bear.

It is offered as interest, but it is by the majority received incredulously. It is not, if I am reading their faces correctly—and here I am becoming a translator too, and perhaps a poor one—it is not a faithful rendering of the biblical text. These are scholars of the Scripture. They are the ones who want to know.

The Lamb of God is a very different kind of thing than The Seal of God and the roaming of Satan as lion very different than as polar bear.

Isn’t it?

II

Everything is an act of translation.

We are constantly translating or mistranslating the Divine.

III

Maybe a year ago now, I was sharing a meal with a good friend and his family. They had spent much of their lives in Nepal, working as Bible translators, producing the Scripture for the first time in the unique language of the native people.

His grandmother was there, a woman who to think of is to think of slow and knowing grace, enfleshed, with a mind that pierces through all your own self-doubt and certain uncertainty and brings forth from you your truth, then leads it on the way to Truth.

“Did I ever tell you about when we were trying to translate the word for forgiveness?”

She asked this while passing the yoghurt for the curry. I told her no. She had, actually, and I don’t think she had forgotten that she had, but I wanted to hear it again.

“They had no conception of forgiveness. None. There wasn’t a word in their language that meant to forgive. They knew about retribution, about revenge, but not about forgiveness.” She leaned back in her chair. “But as we were talking with them, we came to understand that for them, to hold a grudge was to string a person up in their hearts. That’s how they phrased it they strung people up in their hearts.” She offered a small shrug. “So we introduced the concept of forgiveness as the act of unstringing a person in your heart. Loosing the chains. Freeing them.” She smiled. “So when they think of Jesus and His power to forgive, they have a visual sense, an icon that they were once strung up in the heart of God, but now they have been set free.”

She smiled slant. “And you better believe that changes how you think about forgiveness when you’re thinking about forgiving others.”

She’s right. I have never thought about forgiveness the same way.

IV

The Internet ruined us.

For all the good of online community and online spirituality, it has most notably disturbed the fundamental good of regional and contextual theology. You can’t have the Seal of God when someone in white, well-educated, upper middle class America with a Twitter account can instantly denounce it as heretical.

Without regional identity or regional context, the listening for a common language is harder to do, it is harder to find the shortcuts that are still echoes of orthodoxy, or harder still to navigate the careful line between what may be right and true for the church and right and true for the Church.

There is, you know, a difference between those things.

V

I need myriad translations.

I do.

This past Sunday was Pentecost. Pentecost is the day when all the prepositions should be used. In the Incarnation, God is with and among us. But at Pentecost, God is not only with and among us, He is in us, He is through us, He is accomplishing by us, He is within us and without us, He is above us, below us, beside us, He is despite us and He is for us, He is past us and before us and amid us, He is around, between, beside. This is the day when all the words mean something new. This is the day when language itself may be called incarnated.

Is translation so different, after Pentecost?

When the gathered disciples were given those diverse tongues by which to proclaim the Gospel to those diverse peoples outside those walls, do you ever wonder what it would sound like in this language or that, how this word means this or these handful of words mean that. How it takes three words in Greek but one French?

I grant the belief that the Holy Spirit was inspiring them, but I have to marvel, a moment, that God should trust us in this: God trusted us with language and language about Him.

Isn’t that everything?

Do you ever wonder what language Mama Mary spoke in? I’ve wondered more often than not if it was the language of the first humans. She would be prophesying to the earth. The new Eve speaking in the words of the old Eve.

There’s no fact in that. But there is truth.

VI

Good translation is still important. Not every translation is right or every context good. But there needs to be some room for the wild mercy of grace. We need to interpret well, but we also need to want to hear the interpretation. We need to be careful in the how, in the how we go.

And I am thinking here of ideals. And I am unsettled by how rarely we consider ideals nowadays.

Everything is not, in fact, terrible. Everything is not, in fact, gone to shit.

I am thinking of Maximus the Confessor.

“The three young men condemned no one, when they refused to adore the statue everyone else worshipped, … nor did Daniel condemn anyone, when he was thrown into the lions’ den—he simply preferred to die rather than offend God.”

VII

“Aren’t we all working with seals and polar bears?”

She asks the beach this more than she asks me, because that is the way of her. We are walking down from a long lunch, along the grey of a Sunday afternoon, and I have told her the story about the seals and the polar bears.

“All our Bibles are translations, after all.” She stops me, taps me on the shoulder a few times. “Did you know that all the places in Genesis where it says ‘God will provide’ in English, it really says, ‘God sees’?” She shakes her head and we resume walking. “Something about how we can’t understand. We. Well, we want seeing to be about God providing for us, but seeing is more than that. God sees my neighbour. God sees tomorrow. God provides, but God provides in a way that bends the whole of the cosmos to the good He wills. It’s so much more complicated than ‘God will provide.’” She shrugs. “But do I get mad when they say, ‘God will provide?’” She is holding her palms out to me, open, welcoming. “No. Because God sees.”

We keep on after that in silence, along the beach.

The Lamb of God is a very similar kind of thing as The Seal of God and the roaming of Satan as lion very very similar to as polar bear.

Isn’t it?

In the midst of all the scandalous news surrounding the IRS, Benghazi, and AP phone records, chances are you’ve already forgotten about the clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh. Between a 24-hour news cycles and our natural penchant for news that directly affects our lives, it’s really no surprise this story has all but disappeared from the news cycle.

But therein lies the problem.

That clothing factory collapse on the other side of the world is actually more directly connected to your life and my life than any of those other high profile American-centric stories.

Why?

Because the clothing factory in Bangladesh collapsed because of what is hanging in our closets.

On April 24th near the city of Dharka a nine-story building which housed a clothing factory and all its employees suddenly collapsed killing over 1,110 people and trapping hundreds of others under the rubble. Outrage over the terrible working conditions inside the factory and apparent poor quality of building construction quickly erupted around the world. And rightly so. After all, how could anyone allow people to work is such dangerous and ultimately deadly conditions?

While blame certainly rests at the feet of the company who operated the factory and failed to maintain safe working conditions, they are not the only party with blood on their hands. In fact, the web of responsibility is much more complex than that, so much so that it extends all the way across the ocean and into our closets.

The reason there was a clothing factory in Bangladesh in the first place is because Bangladesh offers cheap labor to clothing manufacturers. How cheap? About 24 cents an hour.

So, why not just pay these workers more money and bring their factories “up to code?”

Because higher wages mean more expensive goods and customers don’t want to pay higher prices. While it would make for a simpler narrative, companies like Walmart, Gap, and H&M that have operations in Bangladesh outsource the making of their clothing lines overseas not simply because they want to exploit people on the other side of the world, but because we their customers all but force them to do it. While most of us would be appalled if we saw the working conditions and knew the wages of the people that make the clothes we wear and would no doubt shout our anger from the roof tops, our wallets tell a different story. Our wallets, or more specifically our spending habits reveal the cold hard reality that most of us just don’t give a shit about where we get our clothes, so long as we get them for cheap.

Worse yet, as Tony Campolo would say, most of us in the church care more about fact that I just said “shit” than the fact that countless men, women, and children suffer and die everyday as a direct result of our lust for low, low prices.

Which is why the problem of evil is hanging in our closets.

You see, the problem of evil is not exhausted by things like robbery, rape, or murder. Nor does it only involve the people directly perpetrating the evil. Things like exploitation and oppression are also forms of evil and they are just as insidious as the evil we hear about on the local news, if not more so as they have far more victims and infinitely more perpetrators. In theology this is called systemic evil. It’s the form of evil that arises through the systems that make our modern world go ’round, systems like the global economy.

Itself morally neutral, a global economy connects people across vast oceans who otherwise would never be connected. While new opportunities and new riches are created, so are new problems and new tragedies. An interconnected world allows a company in the United States to search virtually anywhere for the cheapest place to produce their product in order to meet the insatiable demand of their customers for ever cheaper prices.

This rabid pursuit of low cost and higher profits pushes companies to cut corners to keep costs down and encourages their customers to look the other way and not ask questions about how the things they buy could be so cheap. Ultimately, it creates a fantasy world in which low cost goods stop being a blessing and instead are seen as an inalienable right. This mixture of cheap supply and insatiable demand is, of course, a recipe for disaster – a disaster exactly like we just witnessed in Bangladesh.

While you and I may not have directly caused the disaster, the clothes that hang in our closets and the low prices we demand for them make us complicity guilty in this web of evil whether we want to admit it or not.

So what can we do about it?

It certainly won’t be easy or simple, but we can begin by taking our heads out of the sands of entitlement, unbridled consumption, self-centeredness, and vanity and accept our share of the blame. We also have to open our eyes to the reality that cheap goods almost always come at the expense of cheap labor. Now, I’m not saying we all need to start buying $300 jeans and $80 t-shirts, but as Christians charged with caring for “the least of these” we have a responsibility for making sure we are not a part of oppression and injustice, that we are not actively contributing to the problem of evil.

Which means at the very least we can seek to purchase fair trade goods whenever possible. Are those goods more expensive? Of course, but before we start complaining about that higher cost, we should keep in mind it is that very complaint that put us in this situation to begin with.

The problem also isn’t solved buy simply “buying American.” Aside from the difficulty of actually doing so as only 2% of clothes sold in the U.S. are actually made in the U.S., the sad truth is that terrible though those wages in Bangladesh are, they are wages nonetheless. Take away those jobs and the wages along with everything they go to pay for goes with them. Sure, we need jobs in America, but they need jobs in places like Bangladesh too, often much more than we do. So, if we are going to do business with companies that outsource their work overseas, then as responsible consumers we can and should hold them accountable for fair wages and safe working conditions.

You can, of course, search the web and find countless other ideas, but the truth is, there is no easy solution to systematic problems like this. Sure, we could throw the CEO of some clothing company in jail or even pass new laws in an attempt to hold companies accountable, but that would not end the basic problem. Why not? Because this is a problem of greed and selfishness and there is no law that can put an end to those sorts of things.

Which means the “solution” to this evil problem will not be found in Congress or in the courtroom. It will be found within each of us. It will come when we accept the fact that in a globalized economy our decisions have far reaching consequences. It will come when we decide that slave wages and life threatening work conditions are unacceptable prices to pay for a cheap pair of jeans.

It will be come when you and I start loving our neighbors more than we love low prices.

 

Grace and peace,

Zack Hunt