The Meaning of Singleness, Danielle Treweek, foreword by Kutter Callaway. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: A theology of singleness, rooted in a vision of the future, offering meaning, significance, and dignity in living as a single person within the Christian community and in the world.

Singleness. The very word carries for many a negative connotation. A single person is not married. Especially within the church. In the culture, it may mean “anything goes” and “utter freedom”, both in terms of sexuality and more generally in how one lives one’s life. For the church, singleness is often problematized. One’s sexual longings were considered so powerful that self-control and a chaste life is not thought possible for any length of time, and therefore, singles better get married. Along with this, marriage is treated as this relationship where one is “completed” in a combination of romance and sexuality, and all licitly with regard to Christian morality. Singles are just in a holding pattern, waiting for “the one.” Choosing to remain single is even perceived as an attack on marriage.

Danielle Treweek believes both marriage and singleness express important truths that anticipates the union of Christ and his church. Marriage offers a picture of that union and when the reality comes about, marriage will be no more. Likewise, singleness anticipates this future in which we all will be the bride of Christ, forgoing marriage now to live chastely and missionally, and to proclaim the future community where none of us are married but all loved by Christ.

Treweek first analyzes the contemporary context of both society and its expressive individualism of “anything goes” and the church’s context that problematizes singleness. She then proceeds to what she calls a “retrieval of singleness.” She does this by looking at singleness throughout church history, in biblical exegesis of Jesus’s interaction with the Pharisees on the resurrection and no giving in marriage in heaven, and Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians about singleness, and in Christian theology through the ages. Among many other things:

• We discover that in the church, virginity was thought possible for both men and women, and an honorable state, and that also spoke to the married to living continently.
• Marriage is not the remedy to burn with lust! That is not the “burn” Paul had in mind.
• The “gift of singleness” is not some spiritual booster that means the single no longer wants sex or has supernatural self-control. Rather, whatever state you are in is God’s gift and if you are single, you have that gift and are called to live godly in our sexuality and other aspects of life.
• Theologically, we set singleness and marriage within the movement from creation to new creation, the already and not yet in which we live our lives.

In the concluding section, Treweek works out the implications of what was retrieved. She envisions the church as a “teleosocial” movement” in which both singles (both never and formerly married) and the married recognize that Christ has formed a new society, living into its destiny, its end. It means we think of growth not only through procreation but also though discipleship of new believers in which singles (and married) can be spiritual parents. Singles also attest to our sexuality being about far more than genital experience, over and against the culture and the church’s capitulation to it.

All of this is good for the meaning of marriage as well, freeing Christian marriage from the culture’s romantic-sexual fantasy to be seen as portraying Christ’s and the church’s love and union, something far richer than what the culture has on offer. It also means re-thinking a church not formed around nuclear families, but functioning as a larger, more diverse family of singles, marrieds, widows, and children.

This is a scholarly rather than inspirational treatment of singleness, an adaptation of Treweek’s doctoral dissertation. That means working through some dense material at points. Rather than offering comfort while one “waits,” exhorts to marriage, or simply says “suck it up,” Treweek takes us on a deep dive of thinking critically about both contemporary and church culture, explores historical, biblical, and theological resources through history to retrieve riches suggesting a much richer set of resources than our culture offers. She offers a vision of singleness as whole persons with a purpose within God’s story and among God’s people.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.