The Value of Sex in Procreative Reasons

Evangelical Quarterly, 2020

To strengthen a Christian understanding of sex, this article uses the framework of virtue ethics to show how males and females can flourish in distinguishable ways. It shows a positive rather than a negative vision for sexual complementarity since humans tend to gravitate toward beauty. In so doing, it contributes to the complementarian-egalitarian debate which has come to a standstill. Some have tried to bypass the debate by proposing new avenues of conceiving of the divide, yet such proposals fail to convince those entrenched within their exegetical, theological, and social positions. A virtue-centered approach to the debate may breach the impasse and will provide a more accurate account of sex. Specifically, this article argues that motherhood and fatherhood form the essential difference between the sexes and points to humanity’s telos.

Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality, 2022

This paper presents a theology of sexuality that contradicts the popular secular views prevalent in the United States today. It starts by asking which model will be accepted, the profane configuration espoused by humanists, or a godly construction embraced by Christians? Within this context, the covenant of marriage, which offers unconditional love and eternal bliss, is examined and exalted. Stated as fact and presented as evidence of God's grand design, the act of

Madang: Journal of Contextual Theology, 2018

This paper is to critically compare R.S. Corrington's pantheism and C. Keller's panentheism by the medium of a thought of sex. Human sexual behavior is between the transcendental and the natural. It is really natural behavior in that it derives from the species' need for reproduction. However, there lies some transcendental feature in it in that human individuals appropriate its natural instinct in a subliminal way to think of love. When one says, 'Let's make love,' these words implicitly refers to both dimensions at once. The crucial difference between pantheism and panentheism is that God is Nature in panthe-ism, while God is bigger than Nature in panentheism. Here the en of panentheism points to the bigger part of God, which is the divine tran- 90 | Journal of Contextual Theology _ Vol. 29 * Methodist Theological University, Ph. D. http://dx.doi.org/10.26590/madang..29.201806.90 scendental feature. What if sex in its subliminal form refers to the way of the transcendental in nature? Indeed, the sacred is always revealed in our quotidian lives. The transcendental does not mean any place in heaven. In this sense, sex has a potential to become the transcendental. Real love goes beyond the hormonal and algorithmic process of human biology.

2014

Zusammenfassung Die heftige Debatte über Homosexualität in der anglikanischen Kirche konnte nur entstehen, weil biologische Reproduktion als Hauptzweck der menschlichen Sexualität allmählich aufgegeben wurde und die sexuelle Liebe in der angelsächsischen Gesellschaft einen christlichen Wert erhielt. Als der Anglikanismus anfing, Selbsterfüllung in der Ehe als ein wichtigeres Ziel als die Reproduktion zu betrachten, war der Weg frei, die Frage der Moralität nicht-reproduktiver Formen der Sexualität zu stellen. Von einem Verständnis von Schöpfung als Prozess geprägt, haben liberale Theologen die christliche Sexualmoral als weder reproduktiv noch normativ neu bestimmt, und darauf folgend der homosexuellen Liebe eine christliche Legitimität gegeben. Auf der anderen Seite haben viele Konservative, die die Schöpfung als eine feste, sich nie ändernde Realität betrachten, dem Ideal der reproduktiven Sexualität eine neue, metaphysische Bedeutung gegeben. Dieses Ideal strebt nicht mehr das biologische sondern das spirituelle Überleben der Menschheit an. Es geht also immer noch um eine Reproduktion, die des heterosexuellen Urpaares der Genesis, das von Gott am Anfang geschaffen wurde.

M.T.S. Colloquium, University of Notre Dame, 2016

I re-examine the traditional gender requirement for morally endorsed and ecclesially blessed Christian sex and marriage, and suggest it may be “a time to throw [it] away” (cf. Eccl. 3:6). After defining the question, I survey arguments for and against this gender requirement from three Christian ethical approaches: divine commands in Scripture, natural law, and theologies of the body, and suggest the revisionist arguments stronger in each case. Firstly, the best way to make sense of the Scriptural material on gender norms is a ‘trajectory’ hermeneutic, which Christians already apply in many situations. The Bible’s trajectory on gender points away from gender-based restrictions on social, ecclesial, and familial roles. Secondly, common rationalist natural law arguments against homosexuality, based on the procreative end, reduce to an inconsistent rule based on gender essentialism, abstracted from real procreation. The classic natural law method re-applied today can support the removal of the gender requirement, especially if brought into dialogue with newer insights from the observation of nature. Thirdly, ‘gender complementarity’ is an inadequate account of, and norm for, the bodily experience of real people, especially LGBTIQ people. Examining real embodied experiences of human flourishing and suffering provides strong arguments against the traditional gender requirement.

This essay explores the relationship between nature, being, and sexual diierence and argues that adequate understandings of each rise and fall with each other. The case is advanced that human sexual diierence must be understood in terms of a union of modally distinct persons whose union neither destroys nor diminishes their al-terity but rather augments it. Human sexual union is thus seen as like the intellectual union of knower of known. The unique and genera-tive distinction that constitutes sexual diierence provides a window through which one might look more deeply into nature as constituted of the fruitful union of essence and the Origin of all essence. Hence, the meaning of human sexual diierence is found to be bound with the right understanding of nature and to open vistas that reveal the nature of being itself.

Contexts, 2016

This article complicates a popular notion that conservative religions are incompatible with sexual expression and pleasure. Case studies from Orthodox Judaism and evangelical Protestant Christianity demonstrate a breadth of sexual expressions and negotiations of desire and sin that defy the association of conservative religions with sexual repression.