Can Men & Women Be Friends?

In his book, Sacred Unions Sacred Passions, Dan Brennan said,

The Gospel brings a new narrative, one that harks back to the Garden, Christ is reconciling sexuality and spirituality through his reign and his Spirit has given us all the resources we need to create a new community where men and women can live together without engaging in sexual immorality. Isn’t this the story we find in the New Testament, a story where the fundamental attitudes towards one another is love that creates a non-romantic oneness among men and women? In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians he addressed “brothers and sisters” over sixty times. His instructions on love found in 1 Corinthians 13 address attitudes not so much to individual relationship with God as the interaction between Christian brothers and sisters. The thirty-three “one another’s” are addressed to the community, brothers and sisters are to “care for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:25-26), “bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 5:22; 6:2), to “suffer and rejoice with one another” (Romans 12?) and Colossians instructs Christian men and women to “put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing each other…and above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Colossians 3;12-14). In the New Testament the brother-sister metaphor “anticipates the embodied nearness between men and women for all eternity-and suggests we can experience some of that depth as we live between the already and not yet…In the new heavens and earth, Jesus said something significant will change in marriage. Matt. 22:30) Although we don’t know what our future fully looks like it’s evident we will live in eternity as brothers and sisters. It seems to me we should start learning now how to live like we will live in eternity. (Brennan, 58)

What do you think? Are you cautious? Why?How does this question impact your work place? Your faith community? Your friendships? Marriage relationship?What does Scripture teach? Are men and women called beyond our romantic - danger narrative?Join the conversation at our Salon, March 16th at 7PM - Dallas.