The church at Corinth was a mess! They were known to be both getting drunk and having orgies at their worship services, and they were proud because they tolerated incest (or at least tolerated a dude sleeping with his step-mom, which is only slightly less weird). They needed some serious Biblical correction. Their context is not so vastly different from ours. I don’t suppose orgies were part of your worship service last week, but we live in a highly sexualized culture. And the church, just as much as the rest of the world, is deeply confused about sex. A Biblical theological of sex is going to need to take stock of our context. As we seek to develop a right view of God’s design and intent for sex we must be willing to address the issues in our culture that conflict with this view. A proper theology about anything will come from the Word of God and apply to the world. So what is our sexual context?
We are not the first to live in a sexually saturated culture but we definately face a lot of unique challenges. By the dawn of the 1900s marriages were still largely controlled by parents. A man would “call” on a young lady and that meant that he would come to her home and get to know her in front of the whole family. Mom and especially dad were highly involved in the process. In 1896 the word “dating” was in use, but it was a slang term for visiting a prostitute. The urbanization of the 1920s provided new outlets for socializing, specifically outside of the home. Dating as we know it today was born. With the mass availability of the automobile in the 1930s more and more people could gather and meet outside the home. Dance clubs in the 50s provided new outlets for sexual expression to many young men and women. None of this in and of itself made sexual revolution an absolute necessity, but the increased lack of parental oversight didn’t help.
The 1960s made all the hopes of free sexual expression without responsibility a reality. Playboy, which debuted in 1953, became more widely available (though kept behind the counters at select stores), and birth control pills came on the market. The Hippie movement championed sex without restrictions. “Free Sex” became the slogan for much of a generation. The 1970s continued this trend with the legalization of abortion (1973) and no-fault divorce (1974), and with the move of magazines like Playboy and Penthouse out from behind counters onto the racks of convenience stores everywhere. This is the cultural milieu that we find ourselves in today.
Today we have a hook-up culture, where not only marriage and intimacy have taken a back seat, but dating itself has taken a back seat. In 2011, USA Today reported that casual sexual relationships are the ever-increasing norm among college students. Reporting on recent sociological studies Sharon Jayson wrote:
Recent studies indicate that traditional dating on campuses has taken a back seat to no-strings relationships in which bonds between young men and women are increasingly brief and sexual.
Culturally this trend reflects a number of things: (1) Decreases in the social stigma regarding “free sex,” (2) less conviction about relational commitments, and (3) a disconnect between sex and marriage. Jayson views it this way:
It all reflects an emerging paradigm that is altering the nature of sex and relationships among young adults: fewer men than women on campuses; a more openly sexual society that often takes cues from media, and a declining desire to make relationship commitments early in life.
The truth today is that sex just doesn’t mean very much. The pornographic epidemic has made that clear. Sex is all about personal pleasure and nothing more.
The annual revenue for the porn industry is more than 90 billion dollars, wich is more than the revenues of pro football, baseball, and basketball combined. Over 70% of men between the ages of 18-34 admit to viewing Internet pornography at least once a month, and those are just the ones who admit it. And what’s worse is that they start at a very young age. The largest consumers of pornography are young boys between the ages of 12 and 17. And the younger you are exposed to such things the more likely you are to engage in intercourse at a young age. The average age for first sexual encounter is now 16. And this is not just a man’s problem; 30% of women confess to having looked at porn at least once a month. And while this is telling about our culture we need to not be blind to the reality that it has had an impact on the church too.
57% of pastors have admitted to struggling with porn, and Evangelical teens aren’t exactly keeping their purity pledges. While 80% of Christian teens say that they agree that having sex outside of marriage is wrong, two-thirds of them still do it. Research as old ast 2005 said that 65% of teens have had sex by the time they graduate high school, and those numbers have gone up to 80%. Here is where we find ourselves today. Here is why we need a thoroughly Biblical Theology of Sexuality and why a Theology of Sex isn’t enough!
It’s not enough for parents and pastors to keep saying that sex is valuable and good only as God has designed it. We must do something to reinforce this. We must confront and challenge the paradigm that our teens and our parishioners are seeing and encountering everywhere around them. We must equip ourselves and others to expose the lies about sexual sin and cling tightly to the truth of godly sex. That’s part of my goal with this year’s study, and I hope you will join me in it.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 