Rhys Bezzant
13 December 2023
Danielle Treweek, The Meaning of Singleness: Retrieving an Eschatological Vision for the Contemporary Church. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.
Singleness is not a fate worse than death, though in many of our circles you might get the opposite impression. Whether at workplace social events, or in being welcomed at church, awkwardness results when it is discovered that a person is single. How did we get to this? And what can Christians do about it?
Danielle Treweek’s book, The Meaning of Singleness, is a singular achievement and begins to answer the question. Emerging from her doctoral work at St Mark’s National Theological Centre in Canberra, Treweek’s argument draws from deep wells of Scripture, Christian history, and personal insight on contemporary pastoral practice. She writes to challenge shallow reflection on the place of singleness in the Christian tradition, and indeed to challenge unreflective commentary on passages of the Bible that are central to debates about singleness and marriage. At heart, Treweek argues that both singleness and marriage can only be understood when viewed through eschatological lens. In different ways, they provide insights into our ultimate heavenly hope. In the new world, the marriage between Christ and his bride will be consummated, for which marriage now is a picture. In the new world, we shall all be like the angels, for there will be no giving or taking of marriage then, as Jesus teaches. Valuing both singleness and marriage in the church should not be a nil sum game, where esteeming the one necessarily degrades the other’s worth. Surely we can do both at once.
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The first part of the book provides a salutary survey of present pastoral care of single members of the congregation in the context of singleness in society at large. Treweek’s assembling of statistics about contemporary Australia is sobering. These reflections are incisive, and quite frankly disturbing. When in most churches single people number one third of the adult congregation, how can we be so impoverished in the care we provide? The second part of her book names various assumptions about singleness in the church, in effect that singles are “lacking authentic self-actualization in the areas of love, intimacy, romance, sexual satisfaction, friendship, and even general happiness” (p49). And of course, there are different kinds of singleness too: those never married, those divorced, those widowed, those pursuing a life of celibacy in their same sex attraction. Christians have absorbed so much of the secular worldview around us. Indeed, we have especially breathed in its eschatological air. Without realising it, we are caught up in the dominant storyline of our age which highlights self-expression of the sexual kind, without situating our lives within a bigger frame of meaning and purpose. How we need teaching on a better story with Christ at the centre.
In the third part, Treweek takes up several provocative case studies from Christian history in her project of Christian retrieval. Her overview of approaches to “virginity” – the word often used in the early and medieval periods for “celibacy” – was eye-opening, as moderns are confronted by an extraordinary range of examples and views. We meet monks like Anthony and Pachomius who chose singleness, popes like Callistus II who legislated singleness for clergy, Aelfric of Eynsham’s encouragement of virgin-marriages, and of course Augustine’s teaching on the topic which so shaped the Western church’s life. Treweek reminds us that “early and medieval virginity was theologically esteemed precisely because of the profoundly eschatological and communal dimensions considered indigenous to it” (p126). Investigations of the theology of John Paul II and Stanley Hauerwas offer contemporary reflections, from very different perspectives, on the nature of the body, the community, and the future.
The pastoral guts of the book appear in the final section, under the headings of “Telling the Time”, “Making the Meaning”, and “Continuing the Conversation”, where Treweek pulls together the various threads of her argument to deal with the concern that “the unmarried form of Christian life has become both largely unintelligible, and so also largely uninhabitable for the majority of its protagonists” (218). She speaks to spiritual parenthood, expansive sexuality, faithful friendship, and genuine self-denial which is more akin to “glorious self-donation” in her conclusion to encourage new ownership of the experience of being single – which is distinctly not defined around being the opposite of marriage or the absence of a partner!
Treweek’s efforts in writing this book were acknowledged in being awarded the IVP Readers’ Choice Award for Best Book on Cultural Engagement in 2023. As an Australian author, we can be doubly grateful.
The Reverend Canon Dr Rhys Bezzant is senior lecturer in Church History and dean of the Anglican Institute at Ridley College Melbourne.
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