"Such things have the appearance of wisdom, promoting self-imposed religion in expressions of asceticism or severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh". Colossians 2:23.
"For creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of who subjected it, in the confident expectation of what is coming, when it is set free from such bondage". Romans 8:20,21.
How do we define virtue in respect to 'godliness'?
Christian piety is often misconstrued as a stringent form of total moral restraint - a wilful suppression of 'natural' inclinations that would keep any Fraudian analyst busy for many moons.
It is believed that such "behaviour" is the opposite of the licence of an amoral hedonism that intoxicates the modern world, but as two political extremes often meet, so these two approaches (hedonism and asceticism) are essentially expressions of the same malady.
In the present climate of immediate access to unceasing expressions of sexual gratification, many young men are now binding themselves to a chastity that relinquishes all and any relationship to sex. This is not happening out of an orientation towards previously held commonplace spiritual beliefs, but because these males believe their sexuality has been claimed by the crude forces of the present culture, and therefore needs to be taken back by them from such predatory means.
This is a highly significant trend - the 'ownership' of what, it is believed, fundamentally belongs to and defines you, because this mirrors what we have witnessed on other similar moments to what is currently in play.
Usually defined as Vitalism, we can find examples of this amongst Hellenic and Roman schools of thought (Philosophical schools), as well as in the various native "Volk" (life) movements in Germany and Austria which became popular after the great war. These notions were then politicised once more in a union with American political and economic pursuits which used the works of men like William Reich to promote the notion that a particular rendition of sexual promiscuity was to be deemed healthy in the modern world - a notion coupled in the sixties to the prescribed 'freedom' of the permissive society.
Which brings us back to the church.
Paul notes in his Colossians letter just how readily believers can fall into similar notions which inform them that various traits of external behaviour (abstinence from various behaviours) supposedly amounts to a modesty that dislocated them from society and therefore must be valuable in attaining godliness, but the Apostle warns us that such devices can readily become despicable dead ends for the faith. This is because they readily cause us to focus upon what we believe we achieve rather than the perfect work and merits of Jesus, which alone make us what God requires.
Paul tells us that both moral abandonment AND moral self-control, detached from God's saving grace, amount to the SAME end - unproductive beliefs that leave us empty of what is vitally needed - the truth that rescues and holds us.
When the Lord Jesus returns from the cross and the tomb to His friends, He has no problem allowing them examine His wounds, or allowing them see His bodily ascension. In like fashion, you and I are currently invited to participate in His blood and flesh when we attend His table, because these are the very means God provides for our vital, material redemption. Our faith, our life, needs to be folded into this rich and glorious reality, so what we believe and what we practice has to derive from our union - our marriage - to this eternal state, and not some contrived dualistic based folly.
The church historically fights hard to uphold a outward image of chastity (which is clearly far more mixed when you begin to examine the actual lives of believers - in keeping with Paul in Romans 7), but it has very little concern with the trouble Paul raises in passages like the one in Colossians, because this manner of flattering the flesh is more "moral" to our own self-reliance, yet the Apostle clearly notes it as dangerously seductive in its goals and where it leads.
True liberation for all of creation only resides in the blood-bought rescue of Jesus for us, so let us hang all our confidence in respect to the troubles of sin, death, the world and the devil on His atoning grace.
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