Rev Dr Ian Paul. Grove Pastoral Studies 28pp. £4.95 ISBN 978 178827 4364
Downloadable and Paperback
Review by: Canon Chris Sugden, Anglican mainstream.
While driving his youngest daughter to go away on her gap year, the author noted to her that sex was God’s good idea. She responded that she had never heard anything positive like that before.
Ian Paul spells out four positive aspects of sex as God’s gift, for male and female, created irreducibly bodily, and integrated with our intentions and desires. This good gift needs to be handled with care and demands we reclaim many areas of contemporary life as free from sexualization. So he adds four qualifications, that it is powerful, we are fallen, that it has and requires boundaries and is not the ultimate reality.
Sexual union is about the joining of those who are bodily different, as a reflection of the pattern of God’s creation; from this comes the possibility of new life so that the union points beyond itself. For the author’s youngest daughter and other young people, a simple straightforward way of expressing this seems to me to be that sex means ‘you only for me, for life, and responsibility for any children conceived. If it is undertaken without these commitments, it means either nothing more than a peck on the cheek or people are deceiving each other, using something that means everything to mean nothing at all.’
If our separation into binary sexes and their ordering in sexual union are undone, then we return to the chaos which was not God’s intention.
Ian Paul argues against the notion of orientation or transgender as though our sexuality can be divorced from our physical nature which is rooted in creation and affirmed and transformed by the incarnation and resurrection. The creation narrative is of a single binary of male and female, not a multiplicity of male straight, male gay, female straight, female gay, transmale etc. He addresses the misinterpretations of scripture used to justify such notions.
He shows how the apostle Paul completely rejects the acceptability of same sex relations in any form. He affirms that Jesus brings healing to our sexual hurts, forgiveness for our sexual sins, power to break our sexual obsessions and strength to resist our sexual temptations. This was expanded on by former gay activist James Parker in a London meeting in January who counselled that the question to someone with unwanted same sex attraction is “Do you want/need more loving?”, and to lead them thus to Jesus, the Great Lover, who operates out of mercy, grace and forgiveness rather than condemnation. People who have felt unloved need to feel loved and cared for. Christians are called to co-operate with the work of God’s Spirit, and to realise they cannot walk with such people unless they themselves realise they too have missed the mark and are broken. Local church leaders were encouraged to welcome such people and care for them while not approving of their behaviour.
“What is sex for?” should be required reading for the House of Bishops and all General Synod members before any further debates on same-sex blessings etc. It will also help parents seeking to counter the ideologies about sex that are now presented to children even at primary school in the name of education.