How Should Christians Think about Sex? (Questions for Restless Minds)

Christopher Ash, D. A. Carson

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781683595038
• eBook ISBN: 9781683595045
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

"In How Should Christians Think about Sex?, Christopher Ash turns to the Bible to find the wisdom and beauty in God's good design. What is marriage? What is sexuality for? Only God's word makes sense of it all. Jesus' way is better, more liberating, and more affirming. Experience the freedom that comes through living not for your own gratification, but for God's glory"--

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INTRODUCTION

Why is sex so fascinating? (Why did you choose to read this book rather than the others?) That’s one question. But why pay any attention to what Christians believe about sex? That’s quite another. And yet, the very fascination of sex is a pointer to a religious dimension. Every time a lover “worships” his beloved, every time a woman says it will be “hell” to live without her man, whenever someone says to a lover, “take me to heaven,” or describes a woman as a “goddess,” they use religious language.

Ian McEwan’s haunting novel Atonement is better known because of the movie. In the novel, when the lovers Robbie and Cecilia first begin to make love, both in the modern sense of sexual union and in the older sense of a declaration by word (“I love you”), McEwan comments that Robbie “had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.”1 In some way, “it was impossible not to think” that something transcendent was happening. The psychotherapist Carl Jung is said to have commented that when people brought sexual questions to him, they always turned out to be religious, and when people brought religious questions to him, they invariably turned out to have their roots in sex. Sex and religion have always been hard to separate—from the gods and goddesses of the religions of the ancient Near East onward. At the end of his comprehensive study of the goddess Asherah, Walter Maier concludes how impressed he has been by the geographical diffusion of her worship (from Hierapolis in the Near East to Spain in the West) and by its long endurance (from the second millennium before Christ to the Christian era).2 Sex and religion are hard to disassociate for long. So when Christians speak on the subject, this is not religion muscling in where religion has no place; rather it is a conversation about a subject where religion has always belonged.

CULTURE WARS

Christian voices about sexuality struggle to make themselves heard in the midst of heated culture wars. For example, the USA seems to be moving away gradually from cultural conservatism (with its social or religious permissions and prohibitions) to a growing acceptance that sexuality is a personal lifestyle choice. The most controversial issue tends to be gay marriage, but statistically, the most widespread manifestation of this attitudinal change is the growth of unmarried cohabitation either as a trial period before possible marriage or as an alternative to marriage. More than half of married Americans below the age of fifty lived with their current spouse before they were married. Does cohabitation make later divorce more or less likely? Does it make any difference for children to have cohabiting but unmarried parents? Societal attitudes are roughly evenly divided, but in general, the younger a person is, the more likely they are to regard unmarried cohabitation as a good trial for marriage, or even a good long-term arrangement outside of marriage.3

RECOGNIZING PREJUDICE

Because I write in the midst of culture wars, it is especially important to recognize that we all come to this question of sexuality carrying prejudices. We have vested interests in the answers to moral questions because these answers judge us. This includes me as the author. The philosopher Roger Scruton claims “to look on the human condition with the uncommitted gaze of the philosophical anthropologist,”4 but there is no such thing as an “uncommitted gaze.” However open-minded we may pride ourselves on being, each of us brings prior commitments to our consideration of the subject. Our prejudices are shaped partly by the society to which we belong and partly by our own personal histories. Our society shapes our beliefs as to what behaviors are normal, acceptable, and tolerable. It does this more powerfully when its assumptions are unexamined. Soap operas, movies, novels, magazines, blogs, and radio stations all tell stories of people’s lives, and in the telling they convey values—sometimes by explicit approval or disapproval, more often by a silence that just assumes a behavior is acceptable.

But our personal histories also powerfully condition our response to thinking about sexuality. Each of us comes to this question carrying a history of experience or inexperience, of delight or disappointment, of thanksgiving or regrets. That is to say, we come to the subject as participants in the subject, not as objective observers. What we know about sexuality we know from within sexuality, as sexual beings, and therefore our knowledge is at least in part an existential knowledge by subjects who participate in what we know. Therefore we want a worldview and ethic that in some way affirms who we are and how we have behaved. We naturally want to justify ourselves and are prejudiced in favor of worldviews that enable us to do that. By contrast, the worldview I commend here does not affirm me, my thoughts, my attitudes, or my behavior; a Christian worldview by definition challenges me and calls me to change my mind and my behavior. We need to expect this to be uncomfortable if it is true. But that is the question: Is the Christian view of sexuality true?

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SEXUALITY AND CREATION ORDER

The Old Testament speaks poetically of the earth being built upon pillars or foundations, as a way of saying it is stable, with a moral order that will in the end be upheld by its Creator. For example, in Hannah’s prayer (1 Sam 2:1–10) her assertion that “the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s” (2:8) is the basis for her confidence that right will be vindicated against wrong, that moral order will be upheld in the end. We see the same idea in Psalm 75:3–5, where holding the pillars of the earth steady is equivalent to humbling the arrogant and wicked. Again, moral order is upheld.

Another way of speaking of this is to say that the world is built according to wisdom. In the imagery of the Old Testament, this wisdom means something like the architecture of the universe. “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens” (Prov 3:19 ESV). When God built the universe, like a building, he did so according to the blueprint called wisdom. Wisdom is the fundamental, underlying order according to which the universe is constructed. Sometimes we speak of the architecture of a piece of hardware or software, by which we mean the underlying structure, such that, if we understand it, we shall grasp why it behaves and responds as it does. In the same way, to live wisely in the world we need some understanding of the blueprint or architecture upon which the world is built. Christians claim that part of this order is the proper guarding of sexual expression within the security of marriage.

One argument often heard in debates is that changes in sexual behavior and family life are purely the result of cultural shifts and that there are no absolute standards or benchmarks against which to test culture. In particular, it is suggested that cultural conservatives are no more than that, indulging in nostalgia for a mythical bygone era of family stability. In her influential book The Way We Never Were,5 Stephanie Coontz argued that family change is irreversible and we might as well go with the flow rather than hark back to a mythical imagining of 1950s marriage and family life. Against this, Christian people argue that we are under no illusions about some supposed magical ideal era of the past (be it the 1950s or whenever), but whatever the flows of culture, marriage is a creation ordinance, a way of life rooted in the way the world is and the way human beings are. This is the claim.

When Jesus and Paul spoke about marriage, they referred back to Genesis 2:24 as a foundational indication of the Creator’s definition: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Matt 19:5; Eph 5:31). There are presumably many ways in which God could have chosen to create humankind, but this definition implies that he created us as sexual beings whose sexuality is to be expressed only in the exclusive, permanent, social, and sexual union of one man with one woman, publicly pledged and recognized by society in what we call marriage. Another way in which the Bible speaks of this is by calling marriage a covenant to which God is witness (Prov 2:17; Mal 2:14). When a man and woman marry, God is always watching and listening (whether or not it is a church wedding), and he will hold each accountable before him for keeping their wedding promises.

In my biblical and theological study of sexuality, I suggest the following working definition of marriage:

Marriage is the voluntary sexual and public social union of one man and one woman from different families. This union is patterned upon the union of God with his people, his bride, the Christ with his church. Intrinsic to this union is God’s calling to lifelong exclusive sexual faithfulness.6

The most problematic word for many twenty-first-century people is the second word: “is.” How can we say that marriage “is” in such a definite, institutional, and normative way? Surely we ought rather to consider how marriage is evolving, the cultural and social pressures that have caused marriage to change and be transformed, to continue changing in the years ahead, and to be different in different cultures. Marriage may happen to be something in one culture at one time, but it has no stable identity or definition, it is argued. So in a recent essay, Stephanie Coontz begins,

Any serious discussion of the future of marriage requires a clear understanding of how marriage evolved over the ages, along with the causes of its most recent transformations. Many people who hope to “re-institutionalize” marriage misunderstand the reasons that marriage was once more stable and played a stronger role in regulating social life.7

But while it is perfectly valid for social scientists and historians to explore the factors that have shaped the contemporary culture of marriage (including world wars, the emancipation of women, birth control, and social mobility), the Bible sets sexual ethics before us as rooted and grounded in an unalterable moral ordering placed in creation by the Creator. However the cultural tides ebb and flow, we want to say that marriage is certain things. We must not naively expect to deduce what marriage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface (D. A. Carson)
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Sexuality and Creation Order
• 3. Sex in the Service of God
• 4. Sex as a Substitute for God
• 5. Sex in a Disordered World
• 6. Conclusion: Everyone Can Have a Wedding Day!
• Acknowledgments
• Study Guide Questions
• For Further Reading