I. WHAT IS BIBLICAL SEXUALITY?
Human sexuality is– as all humans know from personal experience–quite complex, and talking about the topic of human sexuality is often complicated as well. With discussions concerning issues such as human sexuality, we often find ourselves awash in a sea of previous conversations and assumptions, not all of which are helpful to the conversation at hand. In order to separate out some of the many facets of this issue, I have found it helpful to make several basic distinctions.
I first wish to distinguish between those individuals and groups who believe that human sexuality was formed and given at creation, and those who believe the sexuality is a contextual phenomenon. The former view holds that God defined a righteous pattern of human sexuality, and that deviation from this pattern is sinful.
In my North American context, one comes across this view fairly often. People who share this perspective often read biblical texts such as Genesis 1-3 as divine descriptions of the institution of marriage, outside of which the expression of human sexuality is generally forbidden.
Along with this view of monogamous, heterosexual marriage, one often finds an assumption of gender roles—that is, a belief that all men are to act a certain way and fulfill certain obligations, and likewise with all women.
Adherents of this perspective will often admit that different cultures have slight differences between gender roles and marriage on the surface, but underneath these differences lies a core of similarity with the divine pattern given at creation. On the other hand, many North Americans believe that human sexuality is at least in part a social construction.
That is, they believe that the thoughts and concerns and values of a particular culture helps shape what is ethically acceptable—and more importantly, that this affects what is acceptable to God.
This view puts more emphasis on differences between cultural and historical contexts than on any underlying continuity, and it sees sexuality as a narrow part of a much broader cultural fabric that must be considered holistically. Sexuality, in this view, is not a self-contained module that can be easily compared between different cultures, because changing the cultural context changes the significance of every component part. It is instructive and, I think, helpful for dialogue to confess what one believes, and so I confess that I hold this latter view. It is not that I reject anything like biological differences between males and females, or the like.
Rather, I think that honoring and loving each other and together pursing a just and righteous societyrequires different behavior in various particular communities and cultures.
But we must make another series of distinctions before we even know what we are talking about. What is sexuality? The first thing to note here is that it is a modern term. I can find nothing like a consistent discourse on sexuality in the ancient world, and modern historians have noted that this concept emerged only in the nineteenth century with the scientia sexualis.
It helps to remember that, in the ancient world, there was no sustained and detailed literature on the topic. What we reconstruct as ancient Israelite sexuality would likely seem very foreign to the ancients themselves. Nevertheless, I believe it is helpful to note at least five intertwined, but distinct, facets in the concept of sexuality. These facets, taken together, undergird my conviction that human sexuality is, in large part, a cultural construct. This does not mean, however, that anything and everything is permitted. On the contrary, I believe that we must take our ethical and theological responsibilities very seriously when it comes to sexuality. But I believe that we cannot know what is good in our context and in our culture without abstracting general principles from the biblical text such as ―love God and love the neighbor as oneself‖ — and seeking to recontextualize them in our own cultures.
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