Sacred not Sinful

By Dr Kevin Jenson

This may be the first modern book on Christian sexual ethics to go beyond "married = moral" and "love who you love"!

 

If you're looking for another book on the sinfulness of sex outside of marriage or the need to accept everybody's sexual preferences, this isn't it.

 

Decrying the ignorance that masquerades as purity or godly sexuality, Jenson summons the liberal and conservative church alike to repentance and maturity in our understanding and experience of sex and spirituality.

 

A lifeless and unbiblical "ethic" rooted in gnostic, platonic, and enlightenment thinking has sapped the spiritual vitality of the sexual experience for millions of Christians who do not know how to have a healthy relationship with the body and its natural desires.

 

Paying lip-service to ethics with the assumption that married = moral, there is little thought given to how the call to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength might extend beyond the marriage ceremony and into the bedroom.

 

Can it really be God's will that his children be uninformed and haphazard about His first commandment and blessing to humanity?

 

Sacred not Sinful delivers an earnest and searing wake-up call to move beyond the moral impotence of sexual standards that have ensnared the church and culture in a web of shame, confusion, and oppression.

 

Humbly deconstructing his own experience, Jenson exposes the problematic teachings of purity culture that permeate modern society, and then uncovers a path to sexual flourishing for all humans regardless of sex, gender, or relationship status.

 

His clear love of the scripture and deep persistent faith shine through intensive research and personal wrestling through what the bible says about polyamory, homosexuality, premarital sex, gender identity, pornography, and the intimate connection between sex and spirituality in the Christian life.

 

This courageous and insightful work unravels the toughest ethical questions with positive candor, an open heart, and academic rigor, illuminating what sex reveals about God, the world, and ourselves.  Its roots sink deep into theological and philosophical history, blending a personal story of discovery with biblical analysis, deep reflection, and gentle conclusions.

 

Confident that God has called us to liberate the oppressed, to bring light to the darkness, Christians must overcome their fear and learn what it takes to become a landmark of sexual integrity, freedom, and skill in the midst of a confused culture.

 

Are you ready to break the silent chains of ignorance that keep millions of people from the intimacy and ecstacy of God's design for sexual wholeness?

• Language: English
• Publisher: ANDWYN Ltd
• Release date: Sep 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780991207633

Book preview

In 2018, Joshua Harris kissed purity culture goodbye and called into question the modern evangelical sexual ethic shared by Rob Bell and Matthew Vines that marriage makes it moral.

I was 30 years old and had (re)constructed my relationship with God, but I was still looking for the Bible verse, thou shalt not have premarital sex and facetiously hoping the rapture would come before I lost every man’s battle…again.

As a single Christian, there were only two options for a healthy sex life: don’t do it or don’t judge me.

I judged, because the only examples of sex that I saw were rooted in lust, objectified women, and resulted in fear, guilt, and shame. Sheila Wray Gregoire and others were beginning to uncover the reasons why #metoo was rapidly evolving into #churchtoo, but I already knew…

I knew the time had come for me to choose between God and Sex. This book is my story of how I made that choice, and what I discovered along the way that would change my life forever!

Dr Kevin Jenson - www.drkevinjenson.com

Author - Speaker - Teacher helping Christians have successful conversations about sex, gender, and relationships. Visit my website for details on speaking engagements, workshops, online classes, and free resources to help you on your own spiritual journey to sexual wholeness.

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To My One True Love

Introduction

The story of this book began long before my journey to the wild shores of Acadia described in the closing poem. It had grown within me for well over a decade as I lived and proved the message it is designed to carry. However, it would take a profound moment of commitment to follow the voice of God before I was ready to make the ideas public.

The core teachings contained in these chapters have their foundation in the Bible, but some of them question traditions held closely by many Christian communities. For this reason, I hesitated to write until I felt ready to be held accountable by God for my potential influence as a teacher and to be held accountable by people for having tested and proved my understanding of the scriptures.

I don’t think I would have begun to write this book were it not for two things. First, when I shared with my closest family and friends what I intended to write, they responded with love and acceptance that reassured me our relationship was not based on ideological agreement and may be able to continue despite my unconventional ideas.

Second, my call to write came from a book, In His Steps by Charles Sheldon. It is the book that inspired the popular phrase What Would Jesus Do. That book includes several fictional stories of people who found the courage to live in a way that others could not understand. They did so because they believed it was what Jesus would do.

I read that book on a vision quest to the land of Acadia where I planned to spend hours in contemplation and practice that would guide my next steps toward a career. I had just finished a PhD and was praying through how I could respond to the call of Jesus to lay down my life in order that others might have life. I was reaching the final chapters when I drove across the Penobscot River bridge in the middle of Maine. In the foggy haze, I looked down at a little village below and at that moment I knew exactly what Jesus would do. A few hours later, I sat down in Bar Harbor to write the outline for the book you now hold in your hands.

While I continued to write and study, to practice and learn, my understanding deepened, and I began to feel compassion for those around me who struggled under the weight of fear and guilt that brought pain into their relationships with God and each other. I wondered what it would take to illuminate a pathway some could follow back into connection with God by moving beyond the shame of sexuality.

What would it look like to bring an end to the way of thinking that sexual activity and spiritual awakening are mutually exclusive?

I had experienced both of them together and wanted to understand how sex and spirituality could meet together in a Christian framework. As it spread through my life, I became aware of the beauty this re-integration could offer to a contemporary western culture starved to experience the mystery of God and the magic of sexual connection.

A Healthy Sexual Expression

In my growing up world, God and sex were about as different as God and Satan, and my early efforts toward purity were confounded by the mistaken idea that healthy sexual desire and unhealthy sexual expression both counted as immorality.

Such confusion is understandable in a culture overflowing with sexual expression driven by lust. The popular marketing truism, sex sells, recognizes the consumer orientation of Western civilization, which attempts to degrade the value of sex into an activity of acquisition or performance.

Some secular (non-religious) teachings identify the flow of life in sexual energy as the source of creative power. Sexual energy does not just find its expression in human bodies, but in music, in poetry, and in every creative endeavor! Those who are able to access some level of open, vulnerable, shameless, and pure expression have tasted its incredible potential.

On the other hand, Helen of Troy has taught history that lust¹ can distort sex into the most destructive force the world has ever seen. How many lives have been lost in great battles prompted by the possession of a woman? I do not refer just to European history, but to the violence and tragedy that erupt from high school and college drama. Asexual and demi-sexual categories of demographics are becoming increasingly popular as the drudgery and danger of sexual activity becomes more apparent to the social media generation.

Pornographic ignorance and social stigma surround the experience of sex with an unpleasant context making it difficult to cultivate the skills and mindset required for sacred ecstasy. After a few forgettable moments of pleasure, the regret and shame of social expectations come crashing down on the brave explorers with a warning to never try that again…until next time. Sexual desire is repressed and ignored until it bursts through in uncontrollable fits of lust, shame, and often abuse leading to more fear around the activity and less understanding of the love it has potential to reveal.

In addition to shame of uncultivated sexual desire, many people from a Christian background find that sex is accompanied by a sense of spiritual discomfort. Those who are most keenly uncertain about their sexual expression often hide behind a shield of social morality because it is easier to withdraw and cast judgement on what we fear than to engage with the unknown in a dance of vulnerability and connection.

I think the fear comes from a sense of isolation from the love of God, which leads to an experience of fear, disconnection, and isolation from other people. When it is hard to imagine being seen by God with all of our feelings of shame and incompleteness, it is also hard to be seen by another human in this capacity. For what is another human but an embodied expression of God in the world?

Those who know the full and complete love of God that covers all sense of separation have the capacity to open deeply in the presence of another with vulnerability that knows neither fear nor shame. This is what it means to be naked, to be completely open to the light of truth, to be known by another even as we are known by God. Such knowing of another as oneself is what I think of as intimacy. Some have playfully called it into me you see.

It is possible to get a taste of this intimacy just through the eyes, or through an exchange of ideas, or even through prolonged social contact over the years. However, there is only one activity I know of that brings every aspect of a human being to a single point of meeting. Perhaps there are two, and for this reason the phrase make love, not war is critical for this generation.

When sex is detached from love, it turns the other person (or even oneself) into an object through which some end can be achieved. Some have succeeded in this attempt by making sex about reproduction and denouncing pleasure (thank you, St. Augustine). Others have done the opposite by making sex an avenue for their addiction to pleasure (thank you, Dopamine). Neither of these reflect the beauty of sexual intimacy. Both approaches make people into passive participants and narrow the human capacity for joy into a fleeting moment of performance or pleasure.

I think this is the current state of sexual expression in much of the world as modern sex has devolved into a mostly biological activity with unexplainable (and sometimes tragic) consequences. The goal of this book is to see a restoration of sexual intimacy by understanding its connection to the mystery of Love.

My Intention as a Writer

As an avid reader (especially of books related to Christianity and sexuality), I feel a sense of frustration when people try to write about something they do not understand or have not taken the risk to learn about with their lives. It is easy to standardize, conceptualize, and sermonize about any subject in the world…until it begins to have a personal effect. In formal religious and academic settings, subjects like sex (which have a deep personal impact) are often explored in ways that are impersonal, stifling, unrealistic, and closed to any questions.

Because I am both religious and an academic, I started off on the same pathway. I began writing about pornography, sexuality, and morality for the sake of my own theoretical understanding. Then I discovered that integrity required me to align my life with my new ways of thinking - or at least to try living out the vision for sex and spirituality that I was uncovering with words.

As I began to attempt this alignment between my life and my thinking, I developed and revised the ideas in this book several times. Some of them found their way into other books and essays that you can find on my website.

My goal was to free myself from ways of thinking that proceeded from cultural norms and traditions rather than from truth - which was difficult because I had few models to copy. The church’s position on questions of sexual morality has historically been repression, even within the confines of marriage. The culture’s position has mostly been expression, often without the background of self-knowledge and communication needed for fulfilling human connection. As a result, most people are either starving for sex or gluttons for sex without actually experiencing the truth and love this union can embody.

Neither church nor culture had offered me a healthy example of sexual expression, so I began to look to more ancient sources for potential answers. Calling on my history as a trained Bible scholar, educator, and writer, I dove deeply into the text of the Bible where I discovered that tradition often wears the disguise of truth.

Those who hold closely to tradition sometimes fear a search for the truth because it shatters a comfortable illusion and seems to threaten the validity of their beliefs about God and themselves. I experienced this fear on a regular basis. However, the pain of living with unhealthy beliefs made me willing to confront my ignorance, and I found the courage to uncover an ancient pathway that leads to love and freedom!

Instructions for the Reader

What follows is the story of a journey - my journey - into a way of life that finds sex and spirituality deeply intertwined. I have written this book as an invitation to those who are already full of questions and looking for companionship on their journey of discovery. My natural inclination is toward discovery and simply enjoying what I find in peace and seclusion. But I have chosen to share my story because it has been fascinating to experience and I want others to know there is a possibility of life, joy, and freedom out beyond the confines of fear.

Where you find my insights useful, make them your own. If they are difficult, think about them. If they make you uncomfortable, challenge and prove them! If they are unhelpful to you, please ignore them. My intention in sharing what I have found is not to prove a point but to offer my own thinking and practice as an example for consideration.

Feel free to disagree with any ideas that don’t make sense to you. But think about them first. Respond to them. You may even want to write something to me about them (letters are great!) and offer some beautiful insight you notice that I am still missing. I have studied these subjects long and hard for the past decade both out of intellectual curiosity and personal necessity. However, I still have more to learn!

I have written some of my understanding into this book hoping it might help you on your own journey. Whether you love what I have to say or hate it, I think you will come to appreciate the open disclosure of fundamental assumptions that inform my thinking about sex and spirituality from a Christian perspective. What you choose to do with the ideas is entirely up to you. I only ask that you approach what I have to share with curiosity and an open heart - and (for you scholars) with a Bible in hand. If I am any good as a writer, there is a chance you will find something useful in the pages that follow.

Outline

This book is designed to bring you on a journey through which sex and spirituality once again meet in the ecstasy of sacred union. It is only a beginning, and you are invited as a reader to visit my website where you can find all of the resources and support you need to for your own personal journey.

The first two parts of this book give some definition to how I think about two important and complicated words: God and sex. If you’re not into philosophy, you might want to save them for later - though I think I was able to make them pretty accessible.

The next two parts present what I have come to think it means to be Christian and sex positive. They are full of personal stories and vulnerability.

The fifth and sixth part wrestle through some difficult cultural topics like marriage, adultery, freedom, and purity. They are a blend of popular rhetoric, biblical hermeneutics, and historical sociology couched in a story of intellectual discovery - guaranteed to make you uncomfortable at least twice!

Part Seven contextualizes my experience of these topics by exploring the challenges that I faced in opening up to myself, to God, and to other people as a unique human being with a desire to be free as well as to be loved.

Finally, Part Eight casts a vision for what I think is possible with a Christian and sex positive way of life!

PART ONE

Who is God?

Chapter ONE

GOD IS HOLY

Before moving into a deeper exploration of sex and spirituality, I want to be open and transparent about the perspective I am writing from. The first two parts of this book: Who is God? and What is Sex describe my answers to questions that are much bigger than me and far beyond my ability to define. I have made an attempt to do so because I think it is important for you as a reader to see the process I went through in reaching a conclusion where Christianity and sexuality meet in the experience of sacred union.

Like many philosophers, I have spent my entire life seeking a deeper understanding of the nature of reality. I want to know the ultimate mystery and live out truth with all of my being. The more I learn, however, the more I come to recognize that truth, like the mystery of God, will always be much greater than my own awareness and ability to comprehend it. This chapter is my attempt to share the current form of my understanding and belief about God.

The Mystery of God

The image of God painted in my childhood imagination by Sunday school and church meetings centered around a golden, square-shaped throne where a huge glowing human sat in a white robe deciding what would happen in the universe. Some of this imagery can be found in the Bible in the book of Revelation² or in writings by Moses³ and other prophets.⁴ However, none of those authors described the person I imagined on the throne.

Their descriptions of the divine being they called Yahweh stopped with the throne, the light, what was around the throne, and even what was under it. As far as prophetic visions go, this kind of imagery could be understood as completely symbolic. Nevertheless, my imagination clearly placed a large and powerful man with white hair, golden skin, and a long flowing beard on the throne - and that was God!

Sometime around my early twenties I began to experience a transition in my thinking about God, releasing Him⁵ from the box of my imagination and letting Him occupy the infinite space of mystery. I knew that I would never be able to define infinity with the finite limitations of words, nor understand the fullness of Being with my short experience of life on the earth. Instead of trying to define God (or truth, or love), I began seeking to know God.

I had grown up in a Christian community where people cared so much about defining God correctly that we sometimes forgot about loving God with all our hearts. Perhaps we believed that understanding God was the same thing as loving God. We somehow thought that knowing things about God was the same as knowing God and we forgot about the holiness (untouchable otherness) of God in our arguments over whose beliefs about God were the most correct.

Some people believed they would finally have all of the right answers about God the moment they died and met Him in a place called heaven. In a single moment, all curiosity, wonder, and mystery would come to an end in perfect knowledge. To me, such a perspective challenged the idea of God’s infinite beauty, which I felt content to spend all of eternity uncovering.

Furthermore, I had read of strange beings full of eyes⁶ who already stand in the presence of God and have no rest from calling out holy, holy, holy! I think this means they are constantly catching some new incomprehensible aspect of the divine mystery to which they cannot give a name. This recognition caused me to enter a place of deepening humility.

Jesus said that no one knows the Father except the Son, and no one (including those who heard Him speak) knows the Son, except the Father.⁷ Although Jesus reveals the Father, I don’t think it is possible for any human to see God exactly for who He is because of the great difference between the Creator and creation, between Being itself and humanity as one small aspect of that being. Think about all the people who lived with Jesus for three years and