Asgard is a People

“Asgard is not a place, it’s a people.”

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Later tonight, my housemates and I will be attending a local midnight screening of Avengers: Endgame.¹ A worthy offering, I think, for what will constitute my first ever midnight screening – as a consequence of which, I’m even more hyped than I might have been to go and see this film. And yet more coal was shovelled into the firebox of that hype train this Sunday just gone when I and the good friend I was staying with spent a happy few hours over ginger beer, popcorn, and fancy Easter eggs,² taking in Avengers: Infinity War (which she hadn’t seen) and, prior to that, Thor: Ragnarok (which I hadn’t). Beyond the fact that it made a lot of sense out of certain aspects of Infinity War, I liked Ragnarok a lot as a film in its own right: it was consistently funny, had a solid storyline, and offered a sizeable heap of blog fodder – though for the moment I’ll confine myself to the most obvious analogy only. Spoilers, needless to say, are ahead.

 

Thanks to the talented gaurav-salunkhe at newgrounds.com for this ace picture of Thor as in the arena scene in Ragnarok.

Asgard is not a place, it’s a people. So says Odin in Thor’s weird little dream-vision thing (Marvel sure is keen on major characters having moving encounters with their fathers in spaces that transcend normal barriers of life and death, isn’t it?); so says Heimdall in reassurance as Thor looks out on the destruction his choices have caused. The principle defined in this line was what made the film’s conclusion satisfactory, even triumphant, rather than sad and disappointing. For most of Ragnarok’s duration, the event denoted by that title was exactly what our hero was furiously striving to prevent, but by the conclusion, he had instead deliberately initiated that same event. Ragnarok, as per the Norse mythology from which this region of the Marvel universe draws much of its source material,³ is the prophesied destruction of Asgard at the hands of the fire-giant Surtr, and, since Thor is from Asgard and indeed prince of it, you can see why this is something he’d naturally be keen to avert. But then his long-lost older sister Hela shows up and starts killing people, and even if that’s really only to be expected given that she is goddess of death and all, it’s still clearly Not At All A Good Thing. The crucial fact about Hela is that she draws her power from Asgard-the-place; the longer she stays there, the stronger she gets. And Thor isn’t strong enough to defeat her or expel her, so the only way to be sure of neutralising the threat she poses to the Asgardians and indeed pretty much anyone else who gets in her way, is to bring about Ragnarok and have her go down with the ship, as it were. Asgard-the-place was always bound for destruction: the prophecies left that fact indisputable – but Asgard-the-people is a different matter altogether. Asgard-the-people can file onto a handy getaway spaceship and fly the heck out of there before it all goes down in flames. Asgard-the-people is rescued out of the cataclysm and lives on even as Asgard-the-place is brought to nothing just as it always inescapably would be.

The similarities between Marvel’s Asgard and the real world we inhabit may be reasonably few, but among them is that same inevitable trajectory towards total destruction. Everything that belongs to the present order of things is ultimately going down in flames – literally, as per 2 Peter 3:11: “the present heavens and earth are by the same word reserved for fire, kept unto the day of judgement and destruction of the ungodly people” – and will come to nothing so absolutely that it won’t even be remembered afterwards. “For I am creating new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind,” God declares towards the end of the book of Isaiah; and John sees that promise fulfilled in his vision of the things to come: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away.”⁴ The current world will be destroyed in fire: the prophecies of scripture leave that fact indisputable for anyone who claims to follow the Lord Jesus Christ to whom every page of those scriptures testifies. And in actual fact, we wouldn’t want it any other way, because the present order is held in the clutches of death and destruction as surely as Asgard-the-place was held in Hela’s clutches. Creation has been subjected to futility, writes Paul; it’s in slavery to corruption and groans in longing for freedom. If that freedom is to be obtained, the reign of sin and death has to be toppled just as was Hela’s reign. What is perishable must pass away so that death can die with it. And then will we reach the fullness of our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.⁵

Our adoption as sons; the redemption of our bodies – this is about us as people. Asgard is a people, not a place, and so too is the Church. My general policy when blogging is to try to use Church-with-a-capital-C only in this first sense, because goodness knows there’s a whole host of other senses in which the word might plausibly be construed, and employing that initial uppercase letter or not helps to make a distinction. A small-c church is a building; it’s a particular bit of a building, distinct from the hall where they serve the coffee and host children’s birthday parties; it’s a worship service at a particular time; it’s a denomination or an aggregation of denominations. A Christian talks of ‘my church’, of ‘a different church’, of ‘going to church’, of ‘changing churches’ – none of these are Church in the capital-C sense. The multiple senses of the word aren’t, in themselves, really a problem, mind you – not unless we allow such lowercase-c meanings to cloud the capital-C meaning from our focus. Lots of words have multiple related meanings, and it’s convenient enough to refer to Asgard-the-place as Asgard, but if you can’t tell the difference between Asgard-the-place and Asgard-the-people, you’re not going to be willing to let the place go down in flames and fly the heck out of there – which kind of leaves you going down in flames with it.

 

Down in flames.

The Church is a people. It’s not a people plus extras. It’s people that are going to be rescued out of the cataclysm at the end of the age – not buildings, not patterns of worship, not institutions or administrations or systems of governance. You didn’t catch the Asgardians hauling pieces of Asgard-the-place with them when they ran for the spaceship that would carry them safely away, and nor should you catch us clinging to any structure of church practice or policy or experience as if it belonged to the world to come and weren’t going to go down in flames with everything else. To refuse to let go of some aspect of the present order is to assign oneself to enduring its fated destruction along with it.

This means that we, as a community of believers, should be willing to give up resources and change habits and dissociate from institutions without so much as a backwards glance; and on the flipside, it means that we need to be devoted to helping one another work out the salvation we have been granted, because the Church is a people, not a place or a time or a system or anything else, and people, therefore, are what matter. People are what Christ died to rescue, and people are what we are called to pour our gifts and energy into serving and preserving. Anything else that we might dub ‘church’ can and must be unhesistantly chucked out of the figurative window for the sake of better serving and preserving those people.

And of course, the rescue we have received is far better than the one the Asgardians got: as we learn at the beginning of Infinity War, they escaped Ragnarok only to run straight into Thanos and his population-halving rampage, whereas we once rescued are permanently safe. The present order goes down in flames, yes, but the new heavens and earth that God creates is perfect and everlasting: “death shall be no longer; neither shall mourning, nor crying, nor pain be any longer; the former things have passed away” (that’s Revelation 21 again). The Church is a people, and that people is rescued out of the cataclysm and lives on, and on, and indeed on, forever and ever. Amen.

Footnotes

¹ Trailer to get you extra hyped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jNvJU52LvU. It’s all been leading up to this…

² Did you know there’s a thing called ruby chocolate now that’s made from a different kind of cocoa bean so that it’s naturally pink and tastes like berries? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/06/ruby-chocolate-barry-callebaut-instagram-foodies

³ Though, not going to lie, most of my knowledge of Norse mythology comes out of Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series: http://rickriordan.com/series/magnus-chase-and-the-gods-of-asgard/.

⁴ Bible Gateway links time; here’s the Isaiah, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+65&version=ESVUK, and the Revelation, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+21&version=ESVUK.

⁵ I’m riffing on a few verses from the middle of Romans 8 here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rom+8&version=ESVUK.

John Piper is Wrong About Masturbation

Mindy:        Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s my masturbating time.

Eleanor:      When isn’t it?

The Good Place S1 E12, ‘Mindy St. Claire’ (2017)

 

All right, not my cleverest cover picture ever, but I challenge you to think of an appropriate one for a post like this.

Well, with a title like that, I should probably kick off by clarifying that there are a heck of a lot of things I think John Piper is thoroughly, and thoroughly helpfully, right about. He’s pretty undeniably a very astute and very godly chap, and I’m as much of a Desiring God article junkie as any evangelical of my age. I draw attention to this issue, then, not as an example of the common pattern but as a notable exception to it. Nor is Mr. Piper by any means the only one to hold the view he does on this topic, but given that he’s articulated said view very neatly on a very influential platform, that seemed a good place to start.

This is what John Piper says about masturbation:

Is masturbation wrong? Let me address the issue mainly for men. I cannot imagine sexual orgasm in the loins without sexual image in the mind. I know there are nocturnal emissions, which I regard as innocent and helpful, but I doubt that they are ever orgasmic apart from a sexual dream that supplies the necessary image in the mind. Evidently God has constituted the connection between sexual orgasm and sexual thought in such a way that the force and pleasure of orgasm is dependent on the thought or images in our minds.

Therefore, in order to masturbate, it is necessary to get vivid and exciting thoughts or images into the mind. This can be done by pure imagination or by pictures or movies or stories or real persons. These images involve women as sexual objects. I use the word “object” because in order for a woman to be a true sexual “subject” in our imagination she must in reality be one with whom we are experiencing what we are imagining. This is not the case with masturbation.

So I vote no on masturbation. There may be other reasons why it is wrong. For now I rest my vote on the inevitable sexual images which accompany masturbation and which turn women into sexual objects. The sexual thoughts that enable masturbation do not help any man to treat women with greater respect. Therefore masturbation produces real and legitimate guilt and stands in the way of obedience.¹

All right, he’s talking about men. And maybe, if I were to meet with an onslaught of evidence of sufficient volume and reliability demonstrating that his claim is true of men, I might be prepared to believe it. But I can tell you right now that it’s not true of women. At least not this woman, nor others she knows.

I’ve said before that the world’s label for the form in which my sexual inclinations tend to manifest is ‘demisexual’.² Long story short, nobody in the entire world is romantically appealing to me until we’ve had a lot of conversations about things that matter and he’s shown that he gets me. Erōs, for me, is conditional on philia; the pink heart of the Sims 2 relationships panel (‘crush’) is conditional on the double green smiley faces (‘best friend’).³ Anybody who falls outside that parameter is automatically unattractive; so, due to other reasons, are many who fall inside it, and so right now, there’s nobody at all whom I actually fancy. But that’s not to say I don’t have a sex drive. I want to have sex; I just don’t want to have sex with anyone specific.

Now, on one level, this makes me really lucky, because there are some kinds of sexual temptation that are just not even on my radar: I’m never going to be tempted to sleep around or have a one-night stand or even to entertain lustful thoughts about some celebrity or other. On another level, though, you can probably see the natural conclusion towards which my natural inclinations incline. Masturbation is an ideal solution to the demisexual problem, precisely because it does not require the reference point of any particular individual. For the demisexual, it is perfectly possible to achieve sexual pleasure in the loins without a sexual image in the mind, and in actual fact, the introduction of any specific image or character into the imagination would rather ruin the whole thing. Envisioning romantic contact with a particular individual human is weird and gross and unpleasant; masturbation is tempting because it’s a site of sexual satisfaction that’s free from the need for romantic contact with a particular individual human, real or imagined.

And in this way, John Piper’s entire argument about why masturbation is wrong collapses to the ground with one blow. Leaving … well, leaving what, exactly? If we’ve nullified the one reason we had to call masturbation a sin, can we even be sure that it is?

I once had a lengthy conversation in a pub with a Christian who reckoned it wasn’t.⁴ If I remember rightly, she appealed to Matthew 5:28, the bit about how looking at a woman lustfully counts as committing adultery with her. Based on that principle, she argued, the sinful thing about lust is that it’s an offence against its object; the object of a lustful thought has not consented, cannot consent, and if what takes place in the mind is to be reckoned as if it had taken place in reality (a sobering thought, to be sure), that makes lust essentially a kind of mental sexual assault. Masturbation is different, she continued. It’s not any kind of attack on anyone else, but rather a way of getting to know your own body, which is important for people – in particular women – to feel able to do, especially since things of a bodily and sexual nature – in particular of a female bodily and sexual nature – have often been disdained as sordid and taboo in the past.⁵

There was much there that I was ready to agree with. The point about Matthew 5:28 and the nature of lust rang true. I certainly concur that historic suppression and contempt of female sexuality is something to be resisted. But instinctually, the conclusion that masturbation isn’t wrong didn’t sit right with me. I needed to give the matter more thought.

Of a certainty, the sin of masturbation is not lust. Lust is an offence against its object; masturbation requires no object and so entails no such offence. But still, if we’re arguing that the proper context for sex is between a man and a woman as husband and wife, then masturbation does still take sex out of its proper context.

Because of this a person shall leave behind father and mother and adhere to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, and I say (this) with regard to Christ and the Church.

Classic bit of Ephesians 5 quoting Genesis 2 there.⁶ The ‘one flesh’ thing is clearly about sex, and what Paul then says is that marriage and sex (which is, ultimately, the one thing that distinguishes marriage from any other sort of relationship) are a ‘mystery’ representative of Christ and the Church. By calling it a ‘mystery’ he tells us that we’re dealing with something with a hidden meaning: a metaphor or type whose true significance is only known by divine revelation.⁷ Marriage, and marital sex, is a type of the relationship between Christ and the Church, an imperfect prototype or preview, a picture or stage-play of the real thing. For this reason, to engage in sexual activity of any sort outside that context is to break the type. And God is really not happy about people breaking types, even when they don’t understand them. Take a look at Numbers 20:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Take the staff, and gather the congregation, you and Aaron your brother, and speak to the rock, before their eyes, and it shall give its water. And you shall bring out for them water from the rock, and give drink to the congregation and their cattle. And Moses took the staff from before the LORD, as he commanded him. And Moses and Aaron gathered the gathering before the rock, and he said to them: Hear now, O rebels; from this rock shall we bring out for you water? And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, and much water came out, and the congregation drank, and their cattle. And the LORD said to Moses and to Aaron: Because you did not believe in me, to hallow me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this gathering into the land which I have given them.⁸

Note the deliberate placing of ‘as he commanded him’ after Moses took the staff, not after he rebuked the people and struck the rock twice; the latter actions don’t come under the category of ‘as he commanded him’. And we know that disboedience in itself warrants severe punishment – but blimey, isn’t it striking that this episode is the one on whose account Moses and Aaron (both of them; the second-person verbs here are plural) are excluded from entering the Promised Land? And indeed, it continues to be mentioned as such until their deaths. You’d have thought that if anything was going to get Aaron banned from the land, it would have been that whole golden calf business back in Exodus 32, but no: it was this. Why such a big deal?

Well, in 1 Corinthians 10:4, Paul explicitly identifies the rock from which the people drank in the desert – ‘the spiritual rock following them’ – as Christ.⁹ The rock was a type of Jesus. And by the time we get to Numbers 20, we’ve already had one episode where the rock was struck to bring forth water,¹⁰ just as Jesus was struck once for all the sins of his people and brought forth streams of living water welling up to eternal life.¹¹ That time, God told Moses to strike the rock. This time, he told him only to speak to it. Because in terms of the typology, to strike it again was to re-crucify Christ. Moses and Aaron wouldn’t have been aware of the type, but in disobeying God they broke it, and the punishment was severe.

Returning to the matter at hand, then, I very much suspect that one reason why the Torah prescribes such severe punishments for sexual sin is because sexual activity outside the proper paradigm amounts to type-breaking. There may be other sins involved, sins of lust or theft or betrayal, but even if none of those necessarily apply in the case of masturbation, the issue of type-breaking does. Marital sex is a type of Christ and the Church; to pursue sexual pleasure in the absence of an appropriate partner, then, is, in terms of the typology, to sever Christ from his bride, to demand the blessings brought about by the union while spurning the union itself, to throw aside the hope we have of being with our Lord as his beloved forever and ever.

Is it really as significant, as terrible, as all that? I think so. Then again, I think most sins are more significant and more terrible than we generally realise. And if this is an area in which you’re struggling, O righteous and much-beloved sister or brother in Christ, I say this not to condemn you but to provoke you to fight. The stakes are too high to drift into complacency. Tell somebody about the nature of the temptation you’re battling; get that person to check up on you as often as need be. Set boundaries to avoid tempting scenarios, if you can. Most importantly, pray and pray and pray, because it’s God who achieves your sanctification; you stand no chance in your own strength. (God knows I’ve learned that from experience as well as from scripture.) And preach the gospel to your weak and battle-bruised soul, that God gives strength to stand and grace should we fall, that Jesus was struck once for all and has once for all purified us from all our sins, that all transgressions shall be forgiven human beings provided they acknowledge the power by which Jesus achieved what he did¹² – and that that same power now dwells in us to enable us to live holy lives. You’re not alone, and you’re never too far tainted for forgiveness to find you; and you’ve been freed from your slavery to sin, and by grace through faith you’ve been made capable of conquering and killing your former captor.

John Piper is wrong about masturbation. The sin of masturbation isn’t lust, much as it’s possible that lust and indeed any number of other sins might be involved in it; the sin of masturbation is type-breaking. We are blessed that the mystery, the hidden meaning, of marriage and sex has been revealed to us; let’s strive to treat that mystery with the reverence due it, rather than twisting and breaking it for the indulgence of our flesh. In this as in all sins, adelphoi, confess to your comrades, rely on your Captain, and fight.

Footnotes

¹ What I’ve quoted constitutes most of the article, but if you want the introduction and conclusion as well, here it is: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/missions-and-masturbation.

² See ‘More Conversations with my Internal Hopeless Romantic’, under May 2018 in my blog archive.

³ If I seem to be spouting gibberish at this point, ‘The Sims 2 and C. S. Lewis on Friendship’, under September 2017 in my blog archive, should help to clarify.

⁴ Said Christian blogs at Christians for Feminism, https://christiansforfeminism.wordpress.com/. I don’t agree with everything on there, of course (not a blog exists that I agree with everything on, even my own), but it’s definitely worth a bit of your time. Try ‘Queen Vashti and the Power of Women’, from August 2017, to kick off.

⁵ Sincere apologies are due if I have misrepresented my colloquary’s position in any way. The conversation was some time ago and, you know, I wasn’t taking notes.

⁶ Do check it out in context: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph+5&version=ESVUK.

⁷ The complete list of instances of the word ‘mystery’ in the New Testament, for your perusal and conclusion-forming: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=ESV|version=SBLG|strong=G3466&options=GVUVNH&display=INTERLEAVED.

⁸ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=num+20&version=ESVUK.

⁹ Again, whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+10&version=ESVUK.

¹⁰ Back in Exodus 17: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ex+17&version=ESVUK. That took place at Rephidim, which was then nicknamed Massah and Meribah; the events of Numbers 20 took place at somewhere called Meribah. Same place? Same rock? Surely it must be.

¹¹ I here allude to John 4:14.

¹² And I here allude to Mark 3:28-30.