Category Archives: Sexuality

Sex in Genesis 1:26-31 and 5:1-2

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Martin Davie observes that, taken together, these two accounts make six points about the creation of humankind.

First, we learn that human beings do not exist by chance. God, who created the universe in general, also decided to create human beings in particular and…everything that God creates is ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31), including the human race.

Secondly, we learn that God created human beings as male and female from the beginning…

Thirdly, we learn that it is as male and female that human beings are the image and likeness of God…In God’s kingdom…the special role he has assigned to humanity is that we should serve as his ‘under-kings,’ vice regents or stewards.…

Matthew 8:5-13/Luke 7:1-10 – son? servant? male lover?

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Mt 8:5 When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him asking for help: 8:6 “Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, in terrible anguish.” 8:7 Jesus said to him, “I will come and heal him.” 8:8 But the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Instead, just say the word and my servant will be healed. 8:9 For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me.…

God’s good design for men and woman

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It is sometimes thought that in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 we have two entirely separate and self-contained creation accounts, so different as to be incompatible.

But they are neither contradictory accounts, nor carbon copies of one another.

Claire Smith discusses the similarities and differences most helpfully:

When we look at these two accounts we see there is sameness and difference. They are not conflicting accounts, but they are not carbon copies either. Each makes its own distinctive contribution.…

Toward a biblical theology of sexuality

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Leaving, for the moment, specific issues to one side, what does the big picture of sexuality in the Bible look like?

What follows is based on Ian Paul’s helpful overview (here and here).

1. Sex is God-given

The church has often struggled with this, partly because earlier generations have assumed that 1 Cor 7:1 (‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman’) represented Paul’s own view (rather than that of his correspondents). …

Nine arguments for a ‘non-affirming’ position on same-sex relations

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Preston Sprinkle provides the following summary of his argument in his 2015 book People To Be Loved: Why Homosexuality Is Not Just An Issue:

  1. The Bible talks a lot about marriage yet only affirms heterosexual marriages. This isn’t decisive in itself, but in Genesis 2 Eve’s femaleness seems to be a necessary prerequisite for her marriage to Adam – a marriage that becomes the prototype for all God-sanctioned marriages (Gen 2:24-25).
  2. Jesus highlights sexual difference in marriage, even when he didn’t need to (Mark 10).
…

‘It’s never going to happen. And when it does…’

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Rod Dreher’s ‘Law Of Merited Impossibility‘ is an epistemological construct governing the paradoxical way overclass opinion makers frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and gay civil rights. It is best summed up by the phrase, “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.”’

Or, put more simply: ‘It’s never going to happen. …

‘A better story’ – 14

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C.S. Lewis invited us to consider that our appreciation of everyday objects of desire bring ‘news from a far country’.  They bid us come and behold that great reality of which they are faint reflections.

Indeed, writes Glynn Harrison, the gospel rescues all our desires – including sexual desire.  Our worship should include all legitimate expressions of love – and not just platonic love and agape love.

Sexual love teaches us about the intensity of divine love.…

‘A better story’ – 13

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Compared with the sensuous and graphic promises of Islam, the biblical vision of heaven seems positively chaste.  See, for example, Matthew 22:30.  But there is, perhaps, more to be said.

Sex as both a picture and a taster of divine love.  Although people will not marry each other in heaven, marriage itself will be by no means absent: there will be the one marriage between Christ and his church.  And this picture of heaven, although not the only one, is remarkable deep and powerful. …

‘A better story’ – 11

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Who am I?  People today are obsessed with the question of self-identity.

But a coherent sense of identity is under threat:-

In the past people settled into relatively stable patterns quite early on in their life cycle – a long-term job, getting married, bearing children. Now the transition from adolescence to adulthood stretches into the early thirties, with an ever-widening range of possibilities offering vastly increased options for how to be ‘me’ today.

The problem is magnified by the rise of hyper-connectivity, with the proliferation of social networks and streams of information. …

‘If the church were Christian’ – 9

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If the church were Christian, writes Phillip Gulley, ‘It would care more about love and less about sex.’

The church, apparently, is obsessed with sex.  It frowns on sex outside marriage, divorce, dancing and (especially) homosexuality.  Indeed, it finds the whole subject distasteful.

This anxiety about sex probably has two causes: Victorian mores and ‘the apostle Paul’s obvious aversion to marriage’.  Contrast Paul’s ‘sour assessment of intimacy’ with the delight and joy of the Song of Solomon.…