Name: Meaning of Singleness
ISBN: 9781514004852

Kutter Callaway

Danielle Treweek

Retrieving an Eschatological Vision for the Contemporary Church

Meaning of Singleness

Sean Wilson

This book was stimulating and well worth reading, but I don’t think it succeeded.

This is a very good book for its summary and synthesis of historical material in the Christian theological tradition and of Western society more broadly. Treweek also offers robust correctives to some of the saccharine and sappy accounts of marriage that have been bandied about in evangelical discourse in the last few hundred years.

However, I wasn’t convinced of the “teleosocial” meaning of singleness that Treweek develops. In part, this is owing to Treweek’s “definitionally organic approach” to the definition of singleness, but it frequently resulted in features of virginity being superimposed upon widowhood, for example. The unmarriedness of a widow has a very different shape than that of a virgin, the former probably continuing to live within the social matrix of her previous marriage as she relates to and depends upon her own children.

The single person as described seems to live in a way that is utterly unconditioned by temporal relationships whatsoever: while the Christian married person is precluded from appreciating egalitarian siblinghood with an unmarried Christian, that unmarried Christian is apparently not at all precluded from enjoying egalitarian siblinghood even with that very same married person. But surely it takes two to do a teleosocial tango! The single person as described seems to look at other Christians from behind a one-way mirror.

I also thought that Treweek’s take on natural law, at the very least, left some serious questions about how creation grounds marital ethics more generally. If the resurrection discloses the natural order so as to abolish the norm that people should marry, then it should be asked why it doesn’t have that same effect on the features of marriage itself (e.g., male and female, sexual exclusivity). You could ground these solely in Scriptural imperatives, perhaps, but the relationship of these imperatives to the created order would then be quite attenuated. I also wondered whether Treweek would affirm that a nation has a natural obligation to continue itself into future generations. If so, that would necessitate a marriage norm.

While I didn’t expect every last passage on singleness to be addressed in detail, this book was begging for an exegetical or historical treatment of 1 Timothy 5, which is highly relevant on these questions of vowed vs “unvowed” celibacy, natural familial duties, the extent to which the church displaces the natural family, and the circumstances and reasons for which St Paul would advise marriage. The closest we get to any engagement with that passage is in Treweek’s discussion of some tweets by Michael Foster, in which Foster briefly exposits and applies that passage—and, remarkably, Treweek describes that view as “lamentable”. She also finds Augustine’s appropriation of this same apostolic instruction concerning widows to be a “significant limitation” to his theological usefulness. To be blunt, her thesis seemed not to be able to account for one of Paul’s most straightforward and practical teachings on this issue.

Though I frequently disagreed throughout my reading, I think Treweek made a decent case in this book, and it certainly deserves careful reading and engagement by anyone who’s halfway interested in this topic. Unfortunately, I don’t think the argument in its current form succeeds.

Meaning of Singleness Retrieving an Eschatological Vision for the Contemporary Church