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diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2024/12/17/open_questions_about_sex.md b/website/src/content/blog/2024/12/17/open_questions_about_sex.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b5d6893 --- /dev/null +++ b/website/src/content/blog/2024/12/17/open_questions_about_sex.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +title: Questions I have about sex +description: >- + Mark Vernon got me thinking about how the Church’s teaching on sex may be + evolving. +pubDate: 2024-12-17 +updatedDate: 2024-12-17 +--- + +I just listened back to [Mark Vernon][mark-vernon] talking about sexual desire +and Christian spirituality. + +He recounts how his sex ed at an evangelical camp as a boy taught him to think +hard about holding hands with someone, just in case it led to something +‘immoral’. He felt he had been taught a sexual naïvety, which has perhaps +blinded people to the possibility of abuse – and misunderstood the gospel. + +He puts forward an alternative to that naïvety, whereby sexual experience is an +image or a foretaste of love for, or union with, God, exploring thoughts by +Origen, Julian of Norwich, Dante, William Blake, Iris Murdoch, and various +parables and episodes from the Gospels themselves. + +Part of what’s so interesting about this, is I feel I got my first proper sex +ed, as an adult, in an evangelical Christian context – and it pretty much lined +up completely with what he was putting forward. + +I’m also currently reading (as is Mark Vernon) Diarmaid MacCulloch’s epic +history of Christian sexuality, [Lower Than the Angels][lower-than-the-angels]. +But so far (I’m about a third of the way through and up to about the 5th +century) there have only been odd glimmers of positive Christian understandings +of sexuality. The overwhelming Christian consensus of the early Church +(according to MacCulloch) is that sexual desire is a symptom of humanity’s +fallen state, not our longing for God. + +So I want to know: what changed between Mark’s experience and mine? How is +Christian teaching about sex changing right now? Was my experience typical of +other Christians growing up today, in evangelical churches, across the +denominational spectrum, across Britain, across the global Church? What _is_ +the Christian consensus on sex now, and how old is it, and where did it come +from? + +I guess I’ve got two-thirds of a gigantic tome to work through, first of all. +That’ll be a start. Any answers? Postcards please. + +[lower-than-the-angels]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313582/lower-than-the-angels-by-macculloch-diarmaid/9780241400937 +[mark-vernon]: https://www.markvernon.com/the-gospel-sexual-desire-and-the-abuse-scandals-in-the-church-what-has-the-erotic-to-do-with-god |