Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity

"What sits at the center of Christian sexual ethics is not a negative view of sex; the Christian vision of marriage is not, at its most concise, merely 'no sex before marriage.' Rather, the heart of the Christian story about sex is a vigorously positive statement: sex was created for marriage. Without a robust account of the Christian vision of sex within marriage, the Christian insistence that unmarried folks refrain from sex just doesn't make any sense" (page 25).

"To be sure, scripture has plenty to teach us abou thow rightly to order our sexual lives, but, as the church, we need to ask whether the starting point for a scriptural witness on sex is the isolated quotation of 'thou shalt not,' or whether a scriptural ethic of sex begins instead with the totality of the Bible, the narrative of God's redeeming love and humanity's attempt to reflect that through our institutions and practices. If our aim is to construct a rule book, perhaps the cut-and-paste approach to scripture is adequate: as the bumper sticker wisdom goes, Jesus (or in this case, Paul) said it, I do it. But if we see scripture not merely as a code of behavior but as a map of God's reality, and if we take seriously the pastoral task of helping unmarried Christians live chastely, the church needs not merely to recite decontextualized Bible verses, but to ground our ethic in the faithful living of the fullness of the gospel" (page 30).

(She has been talking about how a thorough understanding of Christian themes of creation and stewardship is more helpful to becoming a good steward than isolated commands not to love money.) "As with wealth, so too with bodies. Yes, St. Paul's sexual guidelines would be sufficient. But they would be sufficient the way a black-and-white film clip is sufficient. Sometimes you see gospel truths in very sharp relief when they are just in black and white. But sometimes they are clearer and more arresting when they are not seen as isolated instructions, but rather as part of the large biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption - the entire story in Technicolor" (page 32).