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