Divine Sex – a book review at Christianity Today
(Link): We All Need Sexual Healing Even followers of Jesus fall prey to our culture’s assumptions about sex.
Excerpts:
- Andrew Wilson/ SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
- …Simply by living in the modern West, followers of Jesus cannot help imbibing the assumptions, practices, and stories of a culture centered on the pursuit and fulfillment of individual desires.
- As a result, our efforts at purity and restraint—pledges, rings, annual sex talks, True Love Waits campaigns—are like fighting tanks with peashooters. We need a more comprehensive and compelling vision of sex.
- …So argues Jonathan Grant, an Anglican pastor in New Zealand, in his book Divine Sex: A Compelling Vision for Christian Relationships in a Hypersexualized Age (Brazos).
- His basic point is that instructions, exhortations, and doctrines are vitally important but go only so far. Instead, we need to thoroughly reimagine our popular narrative of sexual liberation, with all its implied commitments, desires, and practices.
- …Grant is at his best when providing a genealogy of modern sexuality, explaining how we got here and why it matters.
- …This has occurred in five phases, he argues: the separation of sex from procreation (through contraception), then from marriage (with the rise of cohabitation), then from partnership (as sex becomes temporary and recreational), then from another person (through the explosion of online pornography), and finally from our own bodies (through questioning the very categories of “male” and “female”).
- In making sex so easy and individualistic, we have cheapened it and thereby emptied it of its power. We tried to make it simpler, and we ended up making it smaller.
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