47 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
47 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
---
|
||
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
|