REQUIRED READING: Before reading this post, head over to experimental psychologist Richard Beck's wonderful blog Experimental Theology and read the post The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs and the associated comments. This post serves as my contribution to that discussion.

The "eunuch story" may, at least in part, speak to the issue of social contribution or function. It seems that great emphasis was given to function in the old covenant "congregation of the Lord". In modern Evangelical terms, we would say that the "commission" of old covenant community focused around the growth of the Jewish nation, particularly in terms of the "be fruitful and multiply" directive. What we think of as evangelism wasn't a primary focus — having and raising children with a particular worldview and a peculiar kind of monotheism was. Eunuchs could not contribute to this social mandate, and were therefore viewed as vestigials, as supernumeraries. There was a central religious goal, and these eunuchs were people who, having no way to further that goal, had no place in the religious community.

So, when the Spirit of the Lord went to miraculous lengths to ensure that the first known Christian non-Jewish convert was both of an alien culture and a "functionless" eunuch, he clearly intended to make us think about what it means to have "function" within the new covenant community of faith, and further: about how the Christian community, like a family, must embrace a non-utilitarian society.

From "An Experiment in Criticism" by C.S. Lewis (The Pedestrian Quarterly, No 1.)

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. And even when we build disinterested fantasies, they are saturated with, and limited by, our own psychology. To acquiesce in this particularity on the sensuous level—in other words, not to discount perspective—would be lunacy. We should then believe that the railway line really grew narrower as it receded into the distance. But we want to escape the illusions of perspective on higher levels too. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.... One of the things we feel after reading a great work is "I have got out." Or from another point of view, "I have got in"; pierced the shell of some other monad and discovered what it is like inside.

Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandize himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox: "he that loseth his life shall save it".