Singleness is for Everyone - Lecture 1

Singleness is increasingly common in the church. At the time of this event, nearly 40% of Christians ages 30–49 identified as single, yet many described this season as marked by confusion, marginalization, or a lack of clear theological guidance. What does Scripture say about singleness—and how might it be understood not as a problem to solve, but as meaningful within the life of faith?

We gathered at Upper House for an evening conversation open to anyone who had considered questions about singleness—whether single, married, seeking deeper community, or simply curious about God's design for human life and calling. Together, we explored how the Christian tradition speaks thoughtfully and honestly about singleness at every stage of life.

Even if you were not single yourself, chances were that someone you loved was. This gathering aimed to build understanding and empathy across life stages, offering theological depth alongside genuine community for those seeking clarity, encouragement, and a more faithful imagination for singleness.

The evening allowed time to build new relationships, enjoy food and worship, and receive insightful teaching from Dr. Devin White on the theology of singleness. We concluded with prayer ministry and open dialogue, creating a welcoming, low-pressure space to seek God together and respond personally.

Dr. Devin L. White serves as Fellow in Biblical Studies at the Lumen Center and is the author of Teacher of the Nations, a study of Paul's engagement with ancient educational traditions, and Christ Reads in Me (forthcoming), which explores how Paul's approach to Scripture continues to shape Christian interpretation today. His scholarship has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, and he regularly teaches, preaches, and facilitates learning experiences in local churches, bridging rigorous scholarship and the life of faith.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Before I dive in, I want to just throw out one quick word on terminology. Tonight, probably without trying to, I'm going to use the word singleness, I'm going to use the word celibacy. I'm going to use phrases that are way too long, like perpetual sexual renunciation. But for the purposes of this conversation tonight, they all mean basically the same thing. And uh that's essential for simplicity in the limited time that we have. But I want to acknowledge from the outset that with that simplicity, I could appear to be papering over some necessary diversity. Even in the room tonight, an unmarried 25-year-old man who might be considering a life of perpetual sexual renunciation is not exactly the same sort of single Christian as a 55-year-old widow. Both single, but in different places with different experiences and potentially even different vocations. So what I urge you to do, if I say something that you want to know more about, jot yourself down a note. There's going to be time for question and answer. Raise the thorny questions in the Q ⁇ A session because it'll give us a chance to go deeper on some stuff that I can probably only touch on in the lecture itself. Will you join me in prayer? Prayer from Psalm 62. For God alone, my soul waits in silence. For my hope is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation. My fortress I shall not be shaken. On God rests my deliverance and my honor. My mighty rock, my refuge is God. Trust in him at all times, O people. Pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. And now, Lord God, as your disciples waited for you in the upper room, we wait for your spirit. Come, Holy Spirit, lead us into all truth. And come, good Father, send us your Holy Spirit. We ask, we seek, and we knock. And we pray all these things in the name of your Son, the Lord Jesus. Amen. When pastors and theologians find themselves in the position that I was in when I was serving as a full-time pastor, and we have to prayerfully and faithfully make decisions about difficult, the difficult issues, the difficult circumstances that face us on a day-to-day basis, we can either get swept away with the chaos of the moment or we can search for some sort of principle to root us. And the two the two principles and sources that we reach for most commonly are one, Holy Scripture, and two, the tradition of the church. I expect that some of you tonight can already recognize the scene from the history of the church that's depicted on this picture behind me. I'm going to talk about it in a moment, but I just want to say this. After I unpack a bit of the story that's connected to this picture, we're going to spend most of the rest of this first lecture exploring two important biblical texts that touch on singleness. We're going to talk about Jesus' words in Matthew 22, where he has a dispute with the Sadducees, and we're going to talk about Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth. We're going to work through pretty much the whole of 1 Corinthians chapter 7. That's a lot. Buckle up. Listen fast. The picture that you see up behind me, uh, this depicts one of the most important moments in the history of the Western Church from the time of the apostles to the present day. The year is about 386 CE, so about 1600 years ago. And this image depicts the moment when Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest pastors, bishops, theologians in the history of the church, finally surrenders his life to God. He uh he collapses weeping underneath a pear tree in somebody's garden in Milan, and he hears from over a wall the voice of some children calling, like in Latin, tole, lega, tole legay, which just means pick it up and read it, pick it up and read it. And so he does. He grabs a collection of the Apostle Paul's letter and he opens to the book of Romans at random because he's heard that once there was a really important monk in the history of the church, named Antony. We call him Anthony the Great today, who, when he first really dedicated his life to God, walked into church and just heard a verse being read at random, and then he went and obeyed it. So he thinks, I'm gonna do the same, Augustine says, I'm gonna go do the same thing that Antony did. And these are the verses that he read from the book of Romans, chapter 13 and 14. Let us walk decently as in the day, not reveling and in drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its lusts. And he breaks down and he sobs because there has been no obstacle that has so troubled him throughout his teenage years and into adulthood than his inability to control his sexual impulses. It's a famous story. Lots of us, especially the Protestants in the room, love the way that scripture plays such a profound role in this conversion, this true surrender to Christ. But the question that I want to ask is what happened that led Augustine to the pear tree and the garden and Milan? And the answer, if you've read the rest of the chapter of the book, it's called The Confessions, if you've read the chapter of the Confessions in which the story takes place, one good way to answer that question is that it's the witness of single Christians that led Augustine to the pear tree. Augustine has been trying since the age of 19 to live a philosophical life, which means for him trying to master bodily passions and the way that they pull us to do the wrong thing and to live a life in accordance with wisdom. But he finds that he just cannot do it. He's deeply frustrated. His family is a little bit frustrated. And then we get to book eight of the confessions, where a few, a few single Christians pop up onto Augustine's radar in relatively rapid succession. So, first of all, a random visitor who shares the same profession as Augustine, he's an orator, like a teacher of rhetoric. This guy shows up and sees this book of Paul's letters lying on Augustine's coffee table. And he assumes that Augustine must be a Christian. And so he starts to tell Augustine about that monk I mentioned a few seconds ago, this guy named Antony, who from a very young age wandered off into the desert in Egypt, totally renounced all sexual activity, and lived a life of unceasing prayer. And Augustine can hardly believe it. There is such a person, he actually did that. So while Augustine is pondering the life of Antony, he has a conversation with several of his male friends who also happen to be Christians. These two men are engaged to be married, but they've both decided that in con in conversation with one another, that they are going to break up with their fiancés and dedicate themselves wholly to undevoted devotion, wholly to devotion to Christ without any other sort of romantic entanglement. Don't get any ideas, those of you who are engaged in the room. But I mean, miracle of miracles, Augustine tells us that when these gentlemen's fiancés hear about what their what their to be husbands have decided, they also decide we won't marry anybody else. We're also going to live as perpetual virgins. Augustine's head is spinning. So as he continues to explore the church in Milan, he's becoming increasingly frustrated because here he is, having dedicated something like 13 years to the study of philosophy, trying to master his body, and he can't do it. And here are these totally uneducated peasant Christians who are, as he puts it, taking heaven by storm. He is deeply, deeply frustrated. And this is the moment when he finds himself wandering into the garden with the aforementioned pear tree. And I'll just read you some of what Augustine writes next, because the quote is worth having in our ears. This is from uh book eight of Augustine's Confessions. Augustine writes, describing the church, a multitude of boys and girls were there, a great concourse of youth, persons of every age, venerable widows, women grown old in their virginity. Continence was smiling at me, but with a challenging smile, as though to say, Can you not do what these men have done, these women? Could any of them achieve it by their own strength without the Lord their God? Cast yourself on him, do not be afraid. He will not step back and let you fall. Cast yourself upon him trustfully, he will support and heal you. And this is the moment when Augustine begins to sob, when he realizes that in Jesus there may be someone who will lift him up to keep him from falling under the weight of his disordered sexual passion. The witness of single Christians led to the conversion of Saint Augustine. Tonight, if I really have one goal, it's this. It's that I want all of us to leave recovering something of Augustine's wonder and fascination with the power of the single Christian life and with its unique witness to the grace of God and Jesus Christ. I think what we really need today is that Augustinian sense of wonder to help us recover a Christian culture where we find that single Christians are heroes, not objects of pity or suspicion, where other Christians are excited by the thought of imitating the steadfast faithfulness of the single Christians in their lives, a world in a church where Christians who could marry decide to forego marriage just because of their love for Christ, a world in a church where singleness will not condemn a Christian to a life of perpetual loneliness. Because in Augustine's day, there are communities of single Christians who exist within the church. They're normal in every urban center. Only a church like that, I suggest, will do justice to at least the witness of the Christian tradition about the importance of single Christians. So for the rest of this first lecture, really what I want to ask is where did that culture come from? If you know anything about the early church, you know how deeply steeped in scripture they were, that their bishops, their teachers, their monks, their theologians dedicated themselves to the careful study of scripture. So let me just point you to two biblical texts of several that we could look at, but two very important ones that would explain Augustine's life and his experience under the pear, under the pear tree. So if you do have a Bible and you care, you can turn to Matthew 22 and then you can put your finger in 1 Corinthians 7. So quickly, Matthew 22, what's going on here is that it's getting close to the crucifixion. And Jesus is finding himself increasingly in conflict with his fellow Jews, and his fellow Jews are still trying to figure out who exactly he is and what he means. What does he mean for Israel? Is he the Messiah or isn't he? And some Sadducees, one of the sect of Jews at that time, they they come to test him. They come to confront him with what they think is a gotcha moment. In Matthew chapter 22, the Sadducees deny the possibility of a resurrection from the dead. And they try to prove their point by appealing to the practice that scholars of ancient Judaism call, quote, leverate marriage. Now, even if you don't know the term leverett marriage, if you have read Genesis through through Deuteronomy left to right, you've come across this concept a couple times. It's this is the idea behind leverett marriage. Leverate marriage stipulates that if a man dies, he's married, but he has no children. And it's the responsibility of that dead man's biological brother to reproduce with the dead man's wife. And any children that result are understood to be the dead man's children, so that that man's name and his property rights and his inheritance will continue on. They won't be stuffed out, but that particular family line will not end. So you can think about the cautionary tale from Genesis 38 of a guy named Onan, who is the son of Jesus' ancestor, the patriarch Judah. Onan, his brother, dies, but he doesn't complete the deed. And as a result, for his lack of fidelity to his brother, the Lord strikes him down. And if you skip ahead a few books to Deuteronomy chapter 25, Moses writes there of the absolute responsibility of brothers to perform this duty for the sake of any of their dead brothers. Leverate marriage that raises up children for the deceased man is not an option. It is a legal mandate of the Torah. So this is where the Sadducees come to Jesus, and this is what they say. They propose that the practice of leverate marriage disproves the possibility of a resurrection. And here's how their logic works. So I'm going to start reading in Matthew 22, verse 23. Some Sadducees came to him saying that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question. Teacher, Moses says if a man dies childless, his brother shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died childless, leaving the widow to his brother. The second did the same. So also the third down to the seventh. And last of all, the woman herself died. In the resurrection, then, whose wife of the seven will she be? For all of them had married her. Jesus answered them, You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection, people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven. End quote. It's actually a fairly clever one. So hang with it. We assume, like good Christians, that Jesus is right, the Sadducees are wrong, but let's take a minute and at least understand the Sadducees' logic here. The Sadducees' point is that if there were a resurrection, then it would logically entail that this woman would have seven husbands. However, that would be a violation of the Torah's regulations regarding marriage and adultery. A woman cannot be married to seven men simultaneously without being called an adulteress. So therefore, there can be no resurrection, because the Torah clearly insists on the practice of leverate marriage. Aha! Gotcha Jesus. Now, if you're right about the resurrection, you can hear the Sadducees saying, then it implies that God is contradicting his own moral order, but it must be impossible for divine law to contradict itself. That's a plausible interpretation of that passage. But Jesus' response is that they misunderstand not the nature of marriage, but the nature of the resurrection. Because in the resurrection, human sexuality is transformed, it's changed, it's transfigured. And it's transfigured in two ways. Like first, Jesus says, in the resurrection, there is no marriage. Everyone in the resurrection is unmarried. Whatever your relational status was at the time of your death or the return of Christ, the marriage bond is dissolved. Second, Jesus says that the sexual practice, the sexual identity of these people who attained to the resurrection of the dead is, quote, like the angels. So let's think for just a quick very brief second about what that phrase, like the angels, means, because it could shed some light on uh, I think, many of our futures. I don't know when the last time was that you read Genesis chapter six, but Genesis chapter six got a lot of people in antiquity curious because you get this character named Enoch who walks with God and then God takes him. He's just gone, it just vanishes from the story. And so a lot of a lot of ancient Jewish writers would write kind of the equivalent of fan fiction, speculating about what happened to Enoch after God translated him into the presence of God. And one very, very, very widely read piece of ancient Jewish literature is the book that we today just call First Enoch. In genre, it's an apocalypse. It kind of resembles the book of Revelation. And it tells the story of how these watchers, these angelic figures, look down, see human women, see that they're attractive, and these angels bind themselves with oaths to go down and sleep with human women. And they do, and they produce these giants, i.e. the Nephilim, and then God has to send a flood to wipe out the Nephilim, and then the disembodied spirits of these half-human, half-angel Nephilim become the creatures that Jews in Jesus' day called demons. It's a great piece of narrative theology. I recommend it. Now, this is the thing that I want to foreground about that story really, really quickly, is that the first Enoch assumes that angels are capable of procreation, but that they're not supposed to procreate. So consider then that whatever human sexuality transfigured to become angelic might mean, it doesn't necessarily mean the loss of procreative capacity, or like the loss of the sort of embodied human nature that we would normally think of marrying one to another. It's uncertain that Jesus is like referring to an angelic tradition like the one in 1 Enoch when we read the phrase like the angels in Matthew 22, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. All right, so that's Jesus. And one thing that's clear from Matthew 22 is that singleness is literally for everybody. If you attain to the resurrection of the dead, you become single, whether you were married once or 50 times before. So what about right now? That's the resurrection. And this is where the Apostle Paul comes in. I urge all of you after this lecture, go back and just read through 1 Corinthians 7, the whole chapter, top to bottom, do it a few times, because the Corinthians have written to Paul and they ask him one question that he answers in 1 Corinthians 7. Paul quotes it in the first verse. He says, Now, concerning the matters in which you wrote, quote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. The whole of 1 Corinthians 7 is Paul commenting on that one line from a letter that was sent to him. And he's answering the question, is it good or is it not good to refrain from sexual activity, to renounce sexual activity? I'm just going to read a few sections from 1 Corinthians 7 as I go, try to answer this question for yourself. What does Paul think about single Christians? All right, so starting in verse 1, uh let's go to verse 2. Because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a set time to devote yourself to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. This I say by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am, but each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind, and another a different kind. And to the unmarried and the widows, I say that it's well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they're not practicing self-control, they should marry, for it's better to marry than to be aflame with passion. Now concerning virgins, this is skipping down to verse 25, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the impending crisis, it's well for you to remain as you are. Are you bound to a wife? Don't seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you marry, you do not sin. And if a virgin marries, she does not sin. Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. Verse 32. I want you to be free from anxiety. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord, but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband. Say this for your own benefit, not to put any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and unhindered devotion to the Lord. If anyone thinks he's not behaving properly toward his fiancee, if his passions are strong, and so it has to be, let him marry as he wishes. It is no sin. Let them marry. But if someone stands firm in his resolve, being under no necessity, but having his own desire under control, and is determined in his own mind to keep her as his fiance, he will do well. Verse 38. So then he who marries his fiancee does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do better. Now, I don't have time for a full commentary on this text tonight. So let me make some high-level observations. First off, the genre. What Paul is writing is a recognizable philosophical genre on household management. It's a genre that goes back to ancient philosophers like Aristotle centuries before Paul. And it's unusual to find the topic of singleness, intentional lifelong singleness, and one of these discussions of household management, because most of household management is about maximizing the production of the family to keep the political order stable. If you lived in the Roman Empire, you lived in a population that one historian has called, quote, grazed thin by death. If you made it past 10 or 15 years of age, you stood a reasonable chance of making it to 70. But mortality among the young was extremely high. And some estimates say that on average, every woman of marriageable age would have had to produce at least eight children just to keep the population stable. So for Paul to talk about celibacy, singleness, renouncing sex as like a viable social option is really, really disruptive. And not only that, not only does he say that it's optional, he presents it as better. In the first place, he refers to his own practice of singleness as an example that we should think about imitating. Verse 7, I wish that all were as I myself am. Verse 8, it's well for the widows to remain unmarried as I am. This is preferable for Paul because it's a simpler way to be Christian than if you were married. Verses 25 and 26 concerning virgins. It's well for you to remain as you are. Verse 28, those who marry will experience distress, and I would spare you that. Verse 35, I'm saying this for your own benefit, not to put any restraint on you, but to promote unhindered devotion to the Lord. And then above all, verse 38. He who marries his fiance does well, he who refrains from marriage will do better. It's that simple. It's that clearly Paul thinks that the pragmatic benefits of singleness are worth mentioning. Burning with passion is bad. Marriage is good. But singleness, renouncing marriage, is best. And I don't know about you, but that is a sermon that I do not often hear. One verse that's especially important that I haven't commented yet, though. Just keep your finger there, is verse uh seven, first Corinthians seven, seven. Each has a particular gift from God. In our next lecture, we're gonna come back and think more about that word gift. But for now, let me say this. Like, here I am, once upon a time a pastor, a Bible scholar, studying a lot of early Christian theology, trying to learn what's worth learning from St. Augustine, who's again pictured here. So, what do I say to like the earnest, beautiful single Christians who come and sit in my office and talk with me about the questions that they have about themselves, about the church around them? What do I say to these folks when I sit down and talk with them over coffee and they tell me how they're doing well, or they're feeling lonely, or they're they're confused about a passage of scripture like the one that I just read? Remember what I said earlier at the beginning about how Christians should decide what to do and how to act when they're confronted with really serious questions like the ones that our single sisters and brothers pose to those of us who are married, and that single Christians don't need to pose to anyone because they have to look at themselves in the mirror and wonder like, who am I and what am I to God and the church? We need two sources to guide us. We need Holy Scripture and we need the tradition of the church. And in this case, what I am saying is that both scripture and tradition agree on this point. Singleness isn't just an option, it is the single best form of Christian sexuality available to us all today. Augustine shows us that singleness is a gift. It's a gift for the church, it's even a gift for unbelievers like he was. The witness of single Christians led him in the end to repentance. Unbelievers see in single Christians the power of the lot of the resurrection life, an angelic form of life. And Augustine, I think, is particularly helpful because his writing makes it clear that the church was structured to include single Christians in important aspects of his life. There are recognizable communities of virgins, male and female, living around. It's not apparently unusual for two guys who are ready to be married to look at each other in private conversation to say, actually, I think we'd be better off prank for the rest of our lives. And for them to agree. And nobody seems to mind. In fact, what they do is they double the number of virgins in the community because their fiancés go along with it. This is where Augustine ends on like the human sexuality thing and his own quest for mastering his sex drive. This is what he says. This is this is towards the end of Confession to Abe. He says, Many years later, you had shown my mother Monica a vision of me standing on the rule of faith. And now, indeed, I stood here, no longer seeking a wife or entertaining any worldly hope, for you had converted me to yourself. That's tradition, scripture. Sometimes biblical interpretation is very hard. It can be extremely difficult. But in this case, I I have got to admit, I don't find Matthew 22 or 1 Corinthians 7 all that confusing. Matthew 22 clearly said that if you attain to the resurrection from the dead, there is no marriage in the resurrection. And Paul also, very clear. Marriage is good, singleness is bad. And so that leaves me, like the pastor, seeking some sort of guidance with enough to go on. Like if I were a lawyer and we were working towards a court case here, we would call this the end of the discovery phase, where I would have found enough of the facts, the figures that I thought I could proceed with an argument. So this is what I wonder, this is what I wonder next. If it's true that scripture and tradition present single Christianity as normal and even as better than Mary Christianity, how do we practice this today? Like, how do we make sense of conceptualize and order our life together in such a way as to make room for the witness of single Christians? And that's what we're going to tackle in the next lecture.