Episode Details

We look back on the previous four episodes, evaluate what we learned, pull together some loose threads, and set some objectives for future episodes.

This is our fifth and final episode in our mini-series on the Christian view of human sexuality and gender. After listening to four scholars give their various expert perspectives on this topic, Scott and I reflect on what we learned and what issues still need to be explored. Points that we touched on include:

• religions can have varying interests in many other aspects of human existence, but they all have rules around sex
• Christianity and Judaism are particularly interested in controlling sexuality and gender
• would a God of cosmic proportions be as fixated on this?
• perhaps Christianity should be more fixated on poverty than on sexuality
• Christians excel at proof-texting or cherry-picking verses from the first five books of the Bible, from which they get words that they can’t define (abomination; fornication) and phrases that they can’t explain (image of God; your physical body is a spiritual temple; two people being made “one flesh”) to justify their peculiar rules about sex
• a close and careful study of those Old Testament passages, without presuppositions like inerrancy and infallibility, points to a more human origin for those ancient texts
• our extreme difficulty in getting Christian scholars to defend the Evangelical view of sex
• we push back on the claim that the Bible is actually very supportive of sex; Christian experience and Church tradition are even much less so
• Christian aversion to sex stems from its roots in Greek philosophy
• mortality in childbirth is the supreme argument against the Intelligent Design claim that God created us to enjoy sex
• some common arguments that Christians fumble when condemning masturbation, pornography, and homosexuality:
  • “if you’ve lusted in your mind, you’ve already committed adultery”
  • “Jesus’s answer about divorce shows us homosexuality is wrong”
• Jesus wasn’t talking about “Adam&