I came across a very thought provoking article by James B. Nelson entitled, Reuniting Sexuality and Spirituality, which I thought I’d share. In it he points to seven important shifts that have started to emerge in Christian theology the wake of the sexual revolution.
- There has been a shift from theologies of sexuality to sexual theologies.
- There has been a shift from understanding sexuality as either incidental to or detrimental to the experience of God toward understanding sexuality as intrinsic to the divine-human experience.
- There has been a shift from understanding sexual sin as a matter of wrong sexual acts to understanding sexual sin as alienation from our intended sexuality.
- There has been a shift from understanding salvation as antisexual to knowing that there is “sexual salvation.
- There has been a shift from an act-centered sexual ethics to a relational sexual ethics.
- There has been a shift from understanding the church as asexual to understanding it as a sexual community.
- There has been a shift from understanding sexuality as a private issue to understanding it as a personal and public one.
I found this to be a good synopsis of the ground we need to cover and found his first point particularly intruiging. As he says, it’s one thing to ask “What does Christianity … say about sexuality?” It is quite another to ask “What does our experience of human sexuality say about our perceptions of faith.” I have been involved in many conversations on general revelation in relation to the natural world and other religions; not so much in relation to sexuality though. This gives me much to ponder.
Curious Christian 
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