Tag: Sex

Speaking of Labels

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

We do have an industry that supplies us with human identity — it’s called the medical profession. And it might be of help when it comes to people want to decide whether to let a sexual proclivity determine their personal identity. Here’s one blogger who rejects straight as an identity:

1. Publicly declaring that I am “straight” counts as ‘too much information.’

I’ve been asking myself what is the real point of coming out as “straight”? Is that really the kind of thing other people are really interested in? Don’t we all have a vast range of sexual impulses and attractions? Does my deeply personal effort to respond chastely to my sexual attractions really qualify as something I should share with others? To what end? Lots of questions about this—if we’re all human and all doing our best to cope with our own call to chastity, why does it matter whether anyone else knows that my particular discernment has to do with my attractions to the other sex? Rather, it would seem more conducive to personal holiness to strive to align my responses to sexual attraction by seeing a confessor or spiritual director. The parish or the general public? Not so much.

Meanwhile, Carl Trueman observes the latest example of sexual politics that desperately needs to buy a vowel:

Wesleyan University has taken the ever-expanding list of initials used to refer to sexual identities to new heights of absurdity or sensitivity, depending on one’s perspective. We are now apparently up to fifteen letters: LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM.

It is easy to laugh at such gibberish on the grounds that it is as absurd as it is self-regarding. Yet that would be a mistake. First, there is the long-established inability of such groups to laugh at themselves. Indeed, the new libertinism often makes the old Puritanism look comparatively self-effacing and gently playful. . . . Second, there are surely grounds for congratulating folks at Wesleyan on their consistent honesty in the cause of sexual liberation. Liberation, that is, of sex from any intrinsic moral significance. As Luther said to Erasmus in very different circumstances: You and you alone have placed your finger on the hinge on which everything turns.

The good thing about medicine is that a doctor’s determination of sex confirms what nature, Nature’s God, or the God of the universe (you can choose your god, not your sex) does. People come into the world either male or female, not straight, homo, confused, transgender, or even as believer or unbeliever. Sexual preferences are mere accidents of history.

Even better, the most basic human identity is still linked to the genitalia that God made:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)

Teach Us To Number Our Commandments

Published on by D. G. Hart17 Comments

Cardinal Dolan thinks Roman Catholics and American culture need to recover biblical teaching on sex (finally a bishop other than the Roman one):

We rarely, if ever, speak about it. (Just ask Pope Francis! Did you see that, on his flight to Asia last week, a journalist asked him if he would condemn contraception. He replied, “Why are you always asking about that?”)

I’m not proud about the fact that we rarely speak about the sixth and ninth commandment. Why don’t we? One reason might be that, decades ago, we probably did speak way too much about it. A second might be that it’s so controversial. And a third is that we’re still so embarrassed by the sex abuse scandal that we’re gun-shy. . . .

one of our most pointed challenges, as a Church, and, for that matter, as a culture, is to regain the high ground on the nobility of God’s design, to present it credibly and fresh to ourselves, one another, and a society that has reduced sex to culture’s most popular contact sport.

Do the captains of Team Religion in America recognize that players on the team don’t even follow the same play book when it comes to counting the Decalogue?

And does the good Cardinal not see that by blurring church folks and Americans Team Religion has compromised the discipline of the Team’s players? Maybe if all churches worried more about their own members and less about the “other kind” of Americans, the results would lift the boats of the whole nation.

Postscript: meanwhile, Boniface detects in certain apologists — ahem, Mark Shea, who swims in the same hip Northwest culture that Jason and Christian (without the Callers) do — the difficulty the fellows with all the apostolic authority face even from some of their most enthusiastic supporters:

. . . this thread demonstrates some inherent problems in the neo-Cath position: To what degree will we see that alleged orthodoxy to the Church is really just a matter of supporting what is viewed as “current policy”? Is there not a problem with viewing a perennial discipline as merely “policy”? Is not the value of discipline and tradition severely downgraded. if so? And if these sorts of matters are simply the “current policy” that can change the way it changes with each American presidential administration, what tools does the Church really have to ensure discipline and continuity in the long run?

Ultimately, the neo-Cath strategy is to insist loudly that certain things can never be changed so long as the current Pontiff does not want to change them; then, when the “policy” changes with another pontiff, suggest just as loudly that such matters were never immune from change to begin with. I’m not suggesting the practical question of whether or not to admit persons with deep-seated homosexuality to the seminary is a doctrinal question or that infallibility is on the line here; I am suggesting that reasoning that the Church’s very old discipline on this matter (it goes back to Trent and before) can be seen as merely “current policy” is destructively reductionist.

All that Flesh, and No Where to Put It

Published on by D. G. Hart52 Comments

Mark Jones departs from the Puritan opposition to Advent and Christmas by posting about the incarnation. But once again his excitement to make a point may get the better of him:

This shows us just how much God loves “flesh” (i.e., human nature). God is forever identified with humanity because of the incarnation. Thus, heaven will be a “fleshly” place. Not at all “sinful,” but certainly a place where we will be more truly human than we are now. If our bodies and souls are to be redeemed, Jesus had to possess a body and soul, since whatever is not assumed by Jesus cannot be healed. One is not more important than the other, as though we yearn for the day when we can shed our bodies and live as “free-floating” souls. Far from it. We yearn for the day when our bodies and souls are both transformed into the likeness of Christ’s glorious body (1 Jn. 3:2 “…we shall be like him”…).

Funny thing is, this will be an odd sort of fleshly existence where men and women won’t have an obvious reason for those parts of the human body that Paul says are “unpresentable” (1 Cor 12:23).

Obsessed?

Published on by D. G. Hart86 Comments

Is masturbation okay?

It wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that masturbation became classified as a major evil, and in the event it was not because of its sexual nature but because it was treated as a disease. In a 1712 treatise Onania, a writer identified by Laqueur as John Marten “announced that he had providentially met a pious physician who had found remedies for this hitherto incurable disease. The remedies are expensive, but given the seriousness of the condition, they are worth every penny.” This was followed in 1760 by David Tissot’s L’Onanisme, which “became an instant European literary sensation.” After Tissot, doctors claimed that all sorts of medical complications followed from masturbation: “spinal tuberculosis, epilepsy, pimples, madness, general wasting, and an early death.” It was, for Tissot, more dangerous than smallpox.

Why should the liberated Enlightenment worry about a private pleasure like masturbation? Laqueur argues that there were three complaints: Masturbation is private, based on a fantasy, and creates an insatiable addiction. But he thinks something deeper was going on too. The liberation of the Enlightenment was massive and disorienting that the attack on masturbation was, Laqueur claims, the “centerpiece of a program for policing the imagination, desire, and the self that modernity itself had unleashed.”

Oral sex?

Number two, is it unnatural? This is a tricky one. The male and female genitals are so clearly made for each other that there is a natural fitness or beauty to it. What about oral sex? Now you might jump to the conclusion and say: Nope, that is not natural, but I am slow to go there because of what the Proverbs and the Song of Solomon say about a wife’s breasts. This is kind of an analogy. So consider this. It seems to me nothing is more natural than a baby snuggling in his mother’s arms drinking at her breast. That is what breasts are. They are designed to feed babies. So is there anything physically natural about a husband’s fascination with his wife’s breasts? Well, you might say no. That is not what breasts are for. But Proverbs 5:19 says: Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always with her love. And Song of Solomon 7:7–8 are even more explicit, speaking of the woman: Your stature is like a palm tree and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine.

Well, even though there is very little anatomical correlation between a man’s hands or his lips and his wife’s breasts, it surely seems to be, quote, natural, in another way, namely built in delight and desire that God in his Word seems to commend for our marital enjoyment. So I ask: Well, might there be similar desires for oral sex or other kinds of sex? So I doubt that we should put a limit on a married couple based on the claim of it being unnatural. That is risky, but that is where I come down on the naturalness of it.

Hedonism anyone?

Why Sex and Candor Don't Mix

Published on by D. G. Hart102 Comments

H. L. Mencken weighs in:

In the relations between the sexes all beauty is founded upon romance, all romance is founded upon mystery, and all mystery is founded upon ignorance, or, failing that, upon the deliberate denial of the known truth. To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anaesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess. But how can this condition of mind survive the deadly matter-of-factness which sex hygiene and the new science of eugenics impose? How can a woman continue to believe in the honor, courage and loving tenderness of a man after she has learned, perhaps by affidavit, that his haemoglobin count is 117%, that he is free from sugar and albumen, that his blood pressure is 112/79 and that his Wassermann reaction is negative? . . . Moreover, all this new-fangled “frankness” tends to dam up, at least for civilized adults, one of the principal well-springs of art, to wit, impropriety. What is neither hidden nor forbidden is seldom very charming. If women, continuing their present tendency to its logical goal, end by going stark naked, there will be no more poets and painters, but only dermatologists and photographers. . . . (“A Loss to Romance,” Prejudices: First Series, 118-119)

Evangelicals Are So Sexy

Published on by D. G. Hart144 Comments

(Thanks to Alice Kinnon from Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco)

I cannot recommend sufficiently highly the interview that Ken Myers did sometime back with Robbie George about his book on marriage. The missus and I listened to it (again for me) over the weekend and I started to wonder what kind of instruction the family values evangelicals were giving about marriage low those many years ago when they took the familial high ground only now to have lured gays and lesbians up to the same summit. I further wondered whether guys like James Dobson were interested in the function of marriage or was family life (and the sex that went with it) a means toward personal fulfillment. If Jesus could be turned into my boyfriend, could marriage become one long date (with consummation at the end)?

In an older Protestant view of marriage, we don’t see much acknowledgement of the pleasures of sex:

Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue, and of the church with an holy seed; and for preventing of uncleanness. (Confession of Faith, 24.2)

The divines may have been worried in their private lives about whether their wives were fulfilled in the bedroom, but they didn’t try to find biblical justification for the delights of love making. Instead, they kept to the point and looked as sex’s function. No fun here. Sex is duty ( turn-on for workaholics?).

This echoes the way Roman Catholics have also thought about marriage and sex (and accounts perhaps for Robbie George’s insights). For instance, I recently came across this discussion of sexual pleasure which appealed to Thomas Aquinas:

Hence it should be noted that the conjugal act is sometimes meritorious and without any mortal or venial sin, as when it is directed to the good of procreation and education of a child for the worship of God; for then it is an act of religion; or when it is performed for the sake of rendering the debt, it is an act of justice. But every virtuous act is meritorious, if it is performed with charity. But sometimes it is accompanied with venial sin, namely, when one is excited to the matrimonial act by concupiscence, which nevertheless stays within the limits of the marriage, namely, that he is content with his wife only. But sometimes it is performed with mortal sin, as when concupiscence is carried beyond the limits of the marriage; for example, when the husband approaches the wife with the idea that he would just as gladly or more gladly approach another woman. In the first way, therefore, the act of marriage requires no concession; in the second way it obtains a concession, inasmuch as someone consenting to concupiscence toward the wife is not guilty of mortal sin; in the third way there is absolutely no concession.

Minus the stuff on mortal and venial sin, Aquinas’ point strikes me as sensible to any man who has tried to figure out the difference between his legitimate and illegitimate sexual desires.

But if you go to the heady days of the 1970s, just ahead of the curve of the family values promoting Religious Right, you find lots of material not just from Marabel Morgan but from Tim and Beverly Lahaye (who helped give Kuyperian w-wism a footing among evangelicals via Franscis Schaeffer) on the best ways for man and woman to — ahem — “have it all.” Steven P. Miller observes this outpouring of evangelical writing about sex in his recent book (hide the children if not the women):

The husband-wife authorial team — an arrangement common to the genre — offered a vision of sexuality that, if quite traditional when compared to the “key parties” of 1970s lore, was hardly a paean to Victorian mores. . . . they specifically attacked the “old Victorian nonsense that a ‘nice lady doesn’t act as if she enjoys sex'” To the contrary, the authors maintained an abiding concern with female orgasm. In the modern era, they argued, most wives either expected to — or should expect to — receive vaginal or clitorial stimulation from their husbands, who needed the know-how necessary to satisfy such new, but fair standards.

Of Morgan Miller writes:

Morgan and her fans suggested numerous creative strategies for greeting their hardworking husbands. Possibilities for a six o’clock surprise included “pink baby-doll pajamas” and “the no-bra look.” “What about it girls?” Morgan asked her readers. “Are you in a marriage rut? Would your husband pick you up for his mistress?” One critic quipped, “A man married to a Total Woman wouldn’t know whether he’d be coming home after work to Lolita or Bathsheba.” . . . The Total Woman was much more candid about sexual intimacy, however, even as it diluted kinkiness with Christian humor. One Southern Baptist woman, Morgan wrote, “welcomed her husband home in black mesh stockings, high heels, and an apron. That’s all. He took one look and shouted, ‘Praise the Lord?'” (The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years, 23, 24)

All of which makes me think that if Protestants are going to restore some measure of sanity and restraint about sex and its consequences, we may have to listen less to Carl or Tim than to older generations of repressed Christians who must have had some kind of sex life since they procreated but knew better than to write about it.

Don't View This on a Full Stomach

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments

At the same time, before a meal it may put you off eating (thanks to our Cumberland Correspondent). The it in question is a video of Tim Keller on sex and marriage in which he portrays Christian married sex as — well — see the video for yourself.

The problems here are at least a couple: 1) without violating my own code, I suspect that if pressed many married couples would not give two thumbs up to all of their sexual encounters. I also bet that many times a husband is in the mood and his spouse is not. (Has Keller not heard of the proverbial headache?) I would even put more money on the notion that baby boomers talk far more about the pleasures of sex than their parents for whom the encounter was part of marital duty (at least for the wife).

This leads to 2): Christians of an older generation (and Keller is by no means a spring chicken — should it be rooster) didn’t talk about sex or bedroom or bathroom matters. Was that wrong? No. Did it mean they were uptight in ways that boomers found constricting? Sure. But was their wisdom in not giving too much information about private matters? Yes. And to keep up this catechism, did problems accompany silence about topics not fit for the sitting room or even the kitchen? Yes. But I have trouble thinking that the current blather about our private lives has resulted in a great cultural advance.

In fact, Keller’s comments may discredit the ministry of the Word since I am not sure that the guy to whom I want to go for pastoral counsel is the one who is doing a video like this.

Then again, he has patented a variety of Teflon that not only keeps all criticism from sticking but that turns adversity into gold. I am truly in awe.

At the same time, as Carl Trueman wonders about the flap between Janet Mefford and Mark Driscoll over allegations of plagiarism, I wonder if the same question applies to Keller: “Is there an evangelical industrial complex out there or is there a morality which transcends and ultimately regulates the evangelical marketplace?” I would simply vary the question to ask whether any cringe factor or sense of propriety regulates evangelical celebrity culture. It surely doesn’t prevail in the world of Hollywood or professional athletics. But shouldn’t we know Christians by their discretion?

In 29,000 out of 30,000 Denominations This Would Get You In Trouble

Published on by D. G. Hart132 Comments

Apologists for Rome do like to number the many communions that Protestantism has provoked. At the same time, Protestants hear a lot about the superior mechanisms that Rome has for maintaining unity within a universal church.

Less do we hear from the apologists — other Roman Catholic sites on the interweb are not so bashful — about the troubling views of priests, theologians and bishops within the Roman Catholic Church. Here are a couple of recent examples that caught the eye of this vinegary Old School Presbyterian:

Will hell be empty?

Michael Voris recently came out with a video entitled simply “Fr. Barron is Wrong”, challenging the popular priest-evangelist on his repeated statements in favor of the theory proposed by the late Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dare We Hope? that it is acceptable for Christian to have good hope that Hell may be empty. Voris rightly notes that Christ Himself says some souls will definitely go to Hell on numerous occasions, and that the Church’s alleged “silence” on the definitive presence of anyone in Hell is not due to any support for the empty-hell theory, but due to the fact that the definitive presence of any one soul in Hell is not part of Divine Revelation and therefore outside the pale of the Church’s competence to define. Therefore, the fact that the Church has never “proclaimed” anyone in Hell provides no rationale whatsoever for asserting that Hell is empty.

At this point Mark Shea jumped in and accused Voris of smearing Fr. Barron wrongly with his “poison.” It is not my intention here to comment on the antagonism between Voris and Shea; I am more interested in Shea’s comments that the Fr. Barron-Balthasar “Empty Hell” theory is “perfectly within the pale of orthodox speculation” and that “at the end of the day, that’s all you have: two schools of opinion–both of which are allowed by the Church.” Thus, the Balthasarian “Empty Hell” theory is granted a legitimate place on the spectrum of legitimate opinions upon which Catholics can disagree in good conscience, and the traditional opinion that people do in fact go to Hell is also placed on the spectrum as another legitimate “option.”

Do Roman Catholic theologians teach what the church teaches?

An international group of prominent Catholic theologians have called the church’s teachings on marriage and sexuality “incomprehensible” and are asking bishops around the world to take seriously the expertise of lay people in their preparations for a global meeting of the prelates at the Vatican next year.
Church teaching on issues like contraception and same-sex marriage, the theologians write, are based on “abstract notions of natural law and [are] outdated, or at the very least scientifically uninformed” and “are for the most part incomprehensible to the majority of the faithful.”

Addressing next year’s meeting of church leaders, known as a Synod of Bishops, they say that previous such meetings involved “only carefully hand-picked members of the laity.”

Those meetings, they write, “offered no critical voice and ignored abundant evidence that the teaching of the church on marriage and sexuality was not serving the needs of the faithful.”

One reason that many Protestant denominations would not countenance deviation from church teaching and expectations is that they remember the battles with modernism during fundamentalist-like controversies and still understand theological liberalism to be a danger to Christian witness. In contrast, (overkill alert) Rome seems to have forgotten its battles with modernism thanks to the engagement of the modern world called by Vatican 2. In fact, it is curious how much latitude for downright loopy views exists in a church that has a pontiff with remarkable powers compared to a little denomination like the OPC where elders and ministers have as much power in the wider world as a customer service representative at Kroger Super Market.

When will the apologists reasons catch up with their church’s reality? And why don’t Jason and the Callers appeal to the very mechanism that is supposed to protect the church from error?

So how are we to deal with liberalism in the Catholic Church? We ought to pray earnestly for orthodoxy to flourish, support religious orders that are obedient to the teaching of church, support Catholic schools that are obedient to the teaching of the church, volunteer in our parishes and if we encounter truly egregious heterodoxy in our parishes we should contact our bishops.

The Proverbial Pot and Its Black Friend

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

From the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department comes the Baylys’ complaint about the doings in Vatican City. Turns out, the U.S. pastors for whom almost everything is sexual, believe Rome’s problem reduces to sex. The Cardinals, you see, dress like girls, so how could you ever trust them?

Serious men do not parade in embroidered dresses. Men who carry the cross of Christ do not wear fanciful costumes more than once a year, and then only in the company of their children. These men, “princes of the church” resplendent in their papal-conclave regalia, are not serious men. They are men with an unmanly love of finery, fancy and ceremony. They are as serious as Hollywood, as normal as Liberace.

Tim Bayly piles on with quotations from John Calvin about lascivious attire, which the modern day Gilbert Tennent uses to berate those who don’t see anything particularly wrong with how the Cardinals dress. First Calvin:

No bishoprics are so opulent, no abbacies so productive, in short, no benefices so numerous and ample, as to suffice for the gluttony of priests. But while they would spare themselves, they induce the people by superstition to employ what ought to have been distributed to the poor in building temples, erecting statues, buying palate, and providing costly garments. Thus the daily alms are swallowed up in this abyss.

Then Tennent Tim:

We could go on with such condemnations by our Reformed fathers all day, but there’s no use. Reformed men today in the richest nation the world has ever seen have left their fathers in the faith far behind.

As one of the best-known Reformed theologians of our day put it to me concerning such straighforward condemnations of Rome by Luther and Calvin, “They were sinning when they wrote that way.”

Meanwhile, the advertisements for the upcoming Clearnote Pastors Fellowship Conference feature a picture of the famous Reformers Wall in Geneva. In it we see Calvin dressed, you guessed it, in a skirt. To the eye not trained in fashion, it could look like a dress or house smock. Granted, it may not have the embroidery of the Cardinals’ attire, but a gown functions like a skirt and hides what’s going on below.

Which again proves that the Baylys are a tad obsessed with sex. Gowns could look like dresses. But they also may connote authority. Hence, the robes that judges wear. And yet, when you can draw a straight line between outward appearances and spiritual truths, something C. S. Lewis identified with paganism (and which by the way seems to afflict 2k’s biggest critics), you see Rome’s troubles as having less to do with sin, the sufficiency of Christ, and scriptural authority, and more with gowns, celibacy, and sexual scandal.

Does Great Commission Publications Need More Books about Sex?

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

Christianity Today carries a story that Life Way Christian Bookstores (a subsidiary of the Southern Baptist Convention) is not carrying Rachel Held Evans new book (who is she anyway and does she read Tim Keller?) A Year of Biblical Womanhood (biblicism alert). Evans contends that the reason is her use of the word “vagina.” The report goes on to list books that Life Way does sell and how many times these authors use the v-word:

A Celebration of Sex: A Guide to Enjoying God’s Gift of Sexual Intimacy by Douglas E. Rosenau
86 (plus images)
The Gift of Sex: A Guide to Sexual Fulfillment by Clifford & Joyce Penner
73 (plus images)
The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love by Tim and Beverley LaHaye
62
How to Talk Confidently with Your Child about Sex by Lenore Buth
42
The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex (And You Thought Bad Girls Have All the Fun) by Sheila Wray Gregoire
19
The Body Book by Nancy Rue
6 (at least in the 2000 edition; LifeWay’s is the 2012 edition and was not available for review)
Straight Talk with Your Kids About Sex by Josh and Dottie McDowell
6
Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together by Mark and Grace Driscoll
5
Every Young Woman’s Battle: Guarding Your Mind, Heart, and Body in a Sex-Saturated World by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn
4
Crazy Good Sex: Putting to Bed the Myths Men Have about Sex by Les Parrott
4
The Language of Sex: Experiencing the Beauty of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage by Gary Smalley and Ted Cunningham
3
Sex Begins in the Kitchen: Creating Intimacy to Make Your Marriage Sizzle by Kevin Leman
3
Nobody Told Me: What You Need to Know about the Physical and Emotional Consequences of Sex Outside of Marriage by Pam Stenzel and Melissa Nesdahl
3
The Healthy Marriage Handbook by Louise Ferrebee
3
Undefiled: Redemption from Sexual Sin, Restoration for Broken Relationships by Harry Schaumburg
2
The 5 Sex Needs of Men and Women by Gary and Barbara Rosberg
2
And the Bride Wore White by Danna Gresh
1
Reclaiming Intimacy: Overcoming the Consequences of Premarital Relationships by Heather Jamison
1
Capture His Heart: Becoming the Godly Wife Your Husband Desires by Lysa TerKerust
1
The Bare Facts: 39 Answers to Questions Your Parents Hope You Never Ask about Sex by Josh McDowell with Erin Davis
1
God on Sex: The Creator’s Ideas about Love, Intimacy, and MarriagebyDaniel Akin
1

The notable aspect of this story is not so much Christians talking publicly about a word used to describe female genitalia as it is the volume of books that Christians write about intercourse. This is all the more glaring since Life Way states describes its first “core value” as:

1. The Bible
We believe the Bible is the eternal, infallible, inerrant Word of God and is the plumb line for everything we say and do.

So while it is controversial in the Convention to use the c-word (Calvinism), female private parts are relatively common depending on who is discussing them.