catapult magazine

To add to this issue’s discussion on sexuality, I recommend Peter Jones’s latest book, God of Sex: How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality. As the title suggests he gets at a deep connection between your spirituality and your sexuality. The tag line reads, "Sex is spiritual, and pagans know it. How about Christians?"

Has anyone read this book? I have just begun reading it and Jones is making a compelling argument…

To add to this issue’s discussion on sexuality, I recommend Peter Jones’s latest book, God of Sex: How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality. As the title suggests he gets at a deep connection between your spirituality and your sexuality. The tag line reads, "Sex is spiritual, and pagans know it. How about Christians?"

Has anyone read this book? I have just begun reading it and Jones is making a compelling argument…

Haven’t seen that book yet. For a minute, I thought you were talking about Rob Bell’s new book, "Sex God".

I’ve also heard that [i:ed06f264b0]Sex for Christians[/i:ed06f264b0] by Lewis Smedes is worthwhile.

The God of Sex sounds great. It is frustrating that pagans are known for understanding the integral nature of sex when the Bible from the very beginning grounds sex in the spiritual.
Elizabethan puritanism has really rendered the Bible sexless, which is why Seerveld’s view of Song of Solomon is so helpful. Scientific paganism is really to blame as well for turning sexuality into a mere biological function. Christians ought to reclaim the high ground on this issue.

I am in the middle of so many books right now I probably wouldn’t get to it for awhile. It would be great if you could summarize some of the main points of the book, anton (aka "cliff’s notes").

I finally finished Peter Jones’s God of Sex. So I’ll attempt a summary, which I’ll put in a series of posts to break it up and hopefully make it more reader friendly.

Jones begins by noting what an odd couple God and sex are for most people. "God represents disembodied, ethereal holiness; sex is the very essence of hard-driving material pleasure—and never the twain shall meet!" Despite this popular misconception among Christians, there is a deep connection between God and sex. The God of Sex is a book about how spirituality defines your sexuality. Ultimately there are only two basic belief systems—paganism and biblical theism, and the burden of the God of Sex is to demonstrate the implications of these two basic belief systems for sexual practice.

Read on…[/i]

Here’s the heart of the argument, as I understand it:

"The pagan gospel preaches that redemption is liberation from the Creator and repudiation of creation’s structures. It offers the liberation of sex from its heterosexual complementary essence.

"The Christian gospel proclaims that redemption is reconciliation with the Creator and the honoring of creation’s goodness. The gospel celebrates the goodness of sex within its rightful, heterosexual limits."

It is common to construe Christian views on sex as "old-fashioned." Actually we are given the choice between two equally old fashioned belief systems and two equally old-fashioned forms of sexual practice. In one’s sexual practice one either honors or rebels from the Creator. Sex is deeply spiritual! So, despite claims to the contrary, sexual liberation is not "cutting-edge" morality but a return to a much older spirituality, one just as old as Christianity.

But are current issues surrounding acceptance of homosexuality necessarily tied to pagan spirituality? In Part One Jones answers yes. "There is a deep connection between a pagan monistic understanding of God and the practical issues of spirituality, particularly sexuality. The pagan understanding of God as a spiritual force within nature produces a deconstruction of heterosexual norms. Polytheism produces ‘polygender.’" In the first five chapters talks about pagan spirituality and the resulting sexual carnival.

Chapter one talks about the carnival. I know I don’t have to remind *cino readers of the dangers of reading a summary in place of the book, but here I think it’s especially necessary to read the book. Jones wanders far and wide in the realm of pagan spirituality—in conferences, books, campuses, etc, and reports his experience. It’s shocking. It’s not shocking because of the sexual practices going on at places like UC Berkley or in middle of Minnesota; it’s shocking because of how those practices are being advocated as normal and healthy. The names and places and ideas in this section are simply too numerous to summarize. There is a world unlike our little Christian one.

Pagan monism (oneness) works itself out in sexuality by exalting androgyny and homosexuality.

Chapter 2 talks about the death of God and the rise of diverse spirituality. Here we begin to get to the heart of the matter. When you get rid of the Creator or diffuse him into the fabric of nature, two things happen. First, all things become one. Monism: one circle with everything inside, including God. "One Earth." Second, all things become divine. Once in the circle of pagan monism, God spreads his divinity throughout the world, and a whole host of gods emerge, including the self. You end up with one world, many gods.

Chapter 3 introduces the theme of androgyny as the ideal form pagan monism. In her book Androgyny: Towards a New Theory of Sexuality, psychologist June Singer writes, "the archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to…the primordial cosmic unity, that is, it is the sacrament of monism, functioning to erase distinction…that was nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition." As all things become a divinized unity, distinctions are erased, including the distinction between male and female. What she’s saying is that once you get rid of the Creator-creature distinction, you can then get rid of other distinctions such as that between male and female. Her ideal of androgyny is driven by her rejection of the Creator.

Ironically, just as when you make everything one you end up with not one god but many gods, so also when you erase the male/female distinction you end up not with one sex but with many sexes. Virginia Mollenkot advocates an omnigender society. She can currently identify over 13 sexes. It is criminal to arbitrarily limit the choice to just two.

In Chapter 3 we learn that pagan monism exalts androgyny as the ideal (union of male/female); in chapter 4 we learn that t also exalts homosexuality. Shirley MacLaine, in her book Going Within, says that "the point of life itself is to balance both the masculine and the feminine in ourselves…Then we will spiritualize the material and materialize the spiritual to express ourselves for what we truly are—androgynous, a perfect balance." How does this relate to homosexuality? If each person is a perfect, androgynous balance of male and female, there is no need for the opposite sex (there is no "opposite" sex!). Males have femininity in themselves; females have masculinity in themselves. Hence homosexuality is just as legitimate as any other sexual preference.

Finally, Jones then goes all around the world and lists countless examples of the organic connection between pagan spirituality and homosexuality (often in the form of shaman priests). Again, there are too many to summarize. Sexual energy is taken to be a physical expression of spiritual power, and the angrogynous, homosexual priest contains within himself a perfect balance of sexual potency.

Chapter 5 lists the destruction left in the wake of the sexual carnival. Sexual liberation hurts.

I thought to break things up a bit I’d list some fun names: chukchi, Ngadju Dyak, basir, hijras, chakras, Lubacas, Manta, Tupinambas, Yup’ik, berdaches.

In the second half of his book, Peter Jones develops a biblical view on God and sex. Why did God create male and female and set sexual intimacy only within the exclusivity of heterosexual marriage? Why has God spoiled our fun?

Does Jones advocate an old-fashioned view on sex? Not in the sense of returning to the ‘50s. He thinks that in our time the church must incorporate sexuality as part of its witness to the gospel. He doesn’t blush easily (not least because of his adventures in pagan spirituality). The Kingdom of God and kingdom of man are at war, and the turf is now sexuality.

If, however, he advocates the biblical perspective, then his views will be old-fashioned. But we need to compare this "old-fashioned" view with the equally "old-fashioned" view celebrated in the sexual revolution. Both return ultimately to the most ancient of views that resulted from the Fall. Will we honor God or go our own way? Let no one say the sexual revolution is progressive. It is a return (ancient Greek/Rome, Sodom, Gomorrah). If the biblical view is "backwards," the view of sexual liberation must be seen to be equally so!

Biblical theism which honors the Creator-creature distinction will work its way out in humble submission to the God-ordained distinction between male and female and celebration of heterosexual marriage. Celebrating and honoring the Creator, Christians celebrate and honor the created order, as God intended.

Chapter 6. Jones develops his view on sex by beginning with God. He is influenced by Francis Shaeffer’s book The God Who is There. God is "there": he is distinct from all creation as a potter is to his clay (pagan monism diffuses him throughout creation; the pagan’s god(dess) is NOT "there"). It follows that God is holy: he is separate, set apart, special. Holiness, says Jones, is all about people and things being in their right place. God has a proper place, high and lifted up, dwelling in eternity. Further, God is unique and transcendent. He is wholly other; he has incommunicable attributes which set him entirely apart from anything in the created order. And God is personal. He is one God in three Persons. Since he is perfectly satisfied in this fellowship of Persons, he did NOT create us because he was lonely and needed someone to relate to. This leads to the final point about God. He is the Creator; we are his creatures living in his world.

One important implication is that Christians are not bigots. "Theism is not the faith of bigoted people who refues to fit in or get along. It is the truth about who we are as finite creatures in an amazing, beautifully designed universe taht we did not make, face-to-face with the personal Creator who did."

How does this view on God affect our view on sexuality?