Purposeful Sexuality

A Short Christian Introduction

Ed Shaw

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789743111
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexualität & Gender in der Religion

If you're a human being, then you're a sexual being. But what is your sexuality for? That's a question we often struggle to answer because we find it so hard to talk about our powerful and personal sexual feelings - perhaps especially if we're Christians. Ed Shaw explores the Bible's deepest answers to this question in ways that will help everyone to appreciate and enjoy God's purposeful gift of sexuality - whatever your past history, current situation or sexual orientation might be.

1

Why is talking about sexuality so difficult?

Have you ever been part of a conversation where you thought you were all talking about the same experience, person or thing, and then suddenly realized you weren’t at all? A few minutes in, someone provided more details, and you found that what you thought you had in common you didn’t after all: he or she had actually lived in a very different part of town, they hadn’t met your cousin at that party, and they didn’t love the same track on that album. The conversation descended into mutual confusion, then some mild embarrassment, and you each chose to make a quick exit soon after. It happens to me all the time – please reassure me that I am not alone!

We all have unique sexualities

Our rare conversations around sexuality, our capacity for sexual feelings, can be a bit like that. Because people often use the same words, we can too quickly presume that we are talking about the same experiences, and then suddenly realize how different things have been for others. This happened to me quite a lot when I first came out as gay (in a slightly alternative Christian way), and started talking to other same-sex-attracted friends about what I presumed were similar life experiences. It turned out that there was much we shared, but then one of us would say something and be met with looks of utter incomprehension from the others, the confusion and embarrassment made worse by our being a group of repressed Englishmen already far outside our comfort zones.

Since then I’ve started speaking much more honestly and publicly about sexuality, and I’ve been made to realize again and again that we all have unique experiences, that no-one’s experience of sexuality is ever the same as anyone else’s. This makes good communication on the subject a real challenge for all of us. We think we are speaking the same language, desiring the same sorts of things, but we aren’t, and this leads to confusion (and embarrassment) again and again, and often to a sudden wish to start talking about the weather instead.

At one level, this shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise to me – or anyone else. Just think of this relatively common scenario: someone is trying to match up a friend with a colleague whom they think is incredibly good looking. They locate a photo on Facebook, but the friend immediately rejects the handsome colleague: ‘He’s not my type.’ One woman thought a colleague was drop-dead gorgeous, while another didn’t give him a second look. We all fancy different people, and even have phrases for quickly explaining that to others: ‘not my type’. In that sort of context we are not unused to communicating the idea that we feel different things, are attracted to different people and have very different sexualities.

It’s this range of experiences that best explains the constant proliferation of identity markers in our culture today: why we have moved so quickly from inventing the very concept of sexuality to the simplicity of the binary heterosexual or homosexual labels, to distinguishing sub-groups of lesbian or gay (LG), to adding bisexual (LGB), to recognizing transgender (LGBT), to including queer (LGBTQ), not forgetting intersex (LGBTQI), and to avoiding the risk of leaving anyone else out (LGBTQI+).1 It turns out that many people are looking for exactly the right word or letter to sum up their sexual desires (and other related feelings), and are finding that it’s sometimes easier to make up a new one or just to opt for a fluidity that gives them the freedom to move around them all.2 We are all uniquely wired sexually, and all of us will have a unique range of sexual experiences throughout our lives that will shape us in different ways.

All of this makes it a challenge whenever we try to sit down and talk about sexuality with anyone. We can think we’re talking about the same thing but we’re not. We think that other people have shared all our experiences but they haven’t. As a result, we need to be clearer in our communication and to take more care to listen than in almost any other context today. I’ve had hundreds (perhaps thousands) of conversations around sexuality in the last few years and, having got things wrong so often, I’ve been reminded of this again and again. So please expect this short book to be more complicated and challenging than its size might lead you to expect. Especially because there’s more to it than that: we don’t just all have unique sexualities.

We all have uniquely damaged sexualities

There will be people reading these words whose sexuality has been uniquely and tragically damaged by sexual abuse when they were children, by unlooked-for exposure to online pornography as teenagers or by a first painful experience of sexual intercourse as an adult. We carry around emotional scars, perhaps even huge gaping wounds, from what was done to us in the past. And this, of course, makes any conversation about sexuality even harder. It injects so much pain into the discussion, and perhaps reignites feelings of shame that we hoped had died away. Too many people I have spoken to struggle to feel that any of their sexual feelings are good, or to confidently distinguish what sexual behaviour is right or wrong, because of what was cruelly done to them by others.

One of the most famous hashtags of recent years has been #MeToo, which has been used by countless women since 2017 to share the damage inflicted on them and their sexuality (usually by more powerful men). In far too many contexts, the power dynamic between a man with the ability to hire or fire and a woman he wants to have sex with has left that woman (and her career) irreparably damaged. It is right that many of these men (the film producer Harvey Weinstein being a prominent example) have now had their own careers and reputations ruined in return. The sexual revolution that was supposed to free women from being treated as sexual objects in the home has too often given men the cultural freedom to treat women like sexual objects everywhere else as well.

All of this means that some of us will always struggle to talk about sexuality because our sexuality has been so badly damaged. I guess all of us will sadly be able to point to ways in which perhaps just a small comment or careless action has injured our sexuality. I know I’m not alone, for example, in having a body image that has been harmed by our culture’s narrow and unrealistic definition of what makes someone sexually desirable. We all have unique sexualities and we all have uniquely damaged sexualities. And then, to complicate things even further . . .

We all have uniquely damaging sexualities

All of us will have used or expressed our sexualities in ways that have damaged others, sometimes repeating the very damage that was inflicted on us. For some of us, it may be in obviously horrific ways that have left someone else permanently scarred as a result of our abusive behaviour, or it might be the tragedy of an abortion. As a result, we get this point all too easily, and for years we have been bitterly regretting the damage our sexuality has caused.

Perhaps most of us have been quietly damaging others in smaller ways that have gone unnoticed by others, and perhaps unrepented of by us. We have sex, or withhold it, as part of some selfish power play within our marriage. We regularly access pornography online, fuelling an industry that has left many of its trafficked ‘actors’ addicted to sex and drugs. We have had unrealistic expectations of love and romance, determined more by Hollywood romcoms than by realistic expectations. We have noticed that someone is attracted to us, but have not told them of our lack of interest in them because we enjoy the ego boost of having their eyes follow us around the room.

Then there is the reality that these behaviours damage us too – we have been sexually self-harming for years. Some of us have no-one else to blame for the sexual dysfunction brought about by our pornography addiction and compulsive masturbation. I know that many of my own sexual wounds have been self-inflicted, through what I’ve chosen to do with my body or dwell on in my mind.

When it comes to sexuality, almost every adult on this planet is both a victim and a victimizer to a greater or lesser extent. While, on the whole, most men have a worse track record than most women, it is not only men who damage women sexually, and it is not only in heterosexual relationships that damage is done. Different generations have had different patterns of damaging sexual behaviour: we’re too good at overreacting to the damage caused by the previous generation in newly damaging ways. One generation self-harmed through sexual repression, the next through sexual liberation – and back the pendulum swings. At a more personal level, we can be so self-righteously blind to our hypocrisy, publicly criticizing the sexual objectification of people in a film in one moment, then mentally undressing the person who walks past us in the next. The result is that . . .

We all need help

Other people have made a mess of us, and we have contributed to making a mess of others – and ourselves. And, because everyone is implicated in this mess, it can feel as if we have nowhere to turn for the help we all so obviously need. The theologian Ephraim Radner has summarized our shared human predicament well: ‘we do not really have any clear standpoint of experiential purity from which to figure the topic of sexuality out’.3 Left to ourselves, we are in trouble. In the world around us, people who were until recently held up as models of sexual liberation to learn from have now been exposed as sexual predators to avoid. The same has been true of some who have preached sexual morality within our churches: they were privately doing themselves what they publicly condemned in others. In such a context, which of us is foolhardy enough to offer ourselves as a wise and honest authority on the subject? As another theologian, Jessica Martin, honestly puts it, ‘I am a player, not an observer, in a field of extraordinary complexity.’4 And I’m certainly not saying in this book, ‘I’ve got it all right – follow me!’ Quite the opposite! I have made, and continue to make, a right mess of myself (and others) with my own uniquely damaged and damaging sexuality.

The Bible’s story, of course, helps us make sense of all this in the episode it relates in Genesis chapters 1 – 3. It tells of humanity being made good (which accounts for our longing for goodness in all its forms), but soon after choosing to reject goodness for evil (which explains how evil has infected everything about us and the world we live in). It teaches us not to trust ourselves and our desires. So much of the Bible underlines this basic lesson again and again.

So where on earth can we go for the help we all need? Are we irredeemably lost in the fog of human failure? Is there anyone with the ‘clear standpoint of experiential purity from which to figure the topic of sexuality out’?5 This is when the Bible brings us real hope, for in its pages we finally get the help we all need from the only One who perfectly fits that description: Jesus, the Word made flesh.

For part of the good news of Christianity is that the God who created us, who gave us sexuality, has not left us to fend for ourselves when it comes to expressing ourselves sexually in right and confident ways. Instead, he has given us all the help we need in his written word to us and, most of all, in the humanity of his Son. God is not as afraid of talking about sexuality as we are – the Bible is full of sexual imagery and language – and in the person of Jesus he has experienced for himself what it’s like to have a sexuality. We haven’t been left alone to sort out the mess of our sexualities – in him (and him alone) we have all the help we need.

2

What is sexuality for?

‘Did you ask the right questions?’ Friends have challenged me when buying some of the more expensive and important things in life, from a mobile phone contract to a car to a home. My problem is that I haven’t got a clue what the right questions are in those circumstances, so each time I’ve had to phone a friend to help me out. Only then did I get the questions – and answers – I needed.

When we Christians (and other interested parties) have opened up the Bible to find out more about sexuality, we’ve not been asking the right questions. We’ve been preoccupied with questions such as, ‘Who can I have sex with?’ and ‘When can I have sex with them?’ and thought that was all we needed to know. Most of the Christian teaching I received as a teenager revolved around asking and answering these questions (or variations on them) and nothing else really (apart from what actually qualifies as sex). We were taught that we could have sex with someone of the opposite sex (who wasn’t a close relation), but only after we had made a public and lifelong commitment to them in a marriage ceremony. These were clearly and confidently articulated rules, but the reasons for the rules were rarely expla...

Table of contents

• Introduction: What are we talking about?
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Questions for reflection
• Acknowledgments
• Further reading
• Notes