BY WILLIAM G. JOHNSON
funny thing happened on the way to the sexual revolution: the god didn't deliver.
A radical change vis-à-vis sex has swept over Western society during the lifetime of most readers of the Adventist Review. So pervasive is it, encompassing attitudes, language, and practice, that it is nothing less than a revolution.
Today sex is flaunted as it has not been since the days of the Roman Empire, when the caesars and their consorts engaged in orgies and public immorality. Sex sells everything from automobiles to toothpaste; the entertainment industry, from Hollywood to prime-time TV, presses the limits of acceptability ever further; fashion sets styles that lay skin bare and leave little to the imagination; smut has moved from adult bookstores to the home computer; and common speech has become laced with sexual innuendos and expressions previously considered too coarse for polite use.
Researcher George Barna reports that one out of every eight adults indicated that they had sexual relations with someone other than their spouse during the prior month.1 Surveys reveal little difference between the practice of churchgoers and nonattenders concerning premarital intercourse and cohabitation.2
I leave it to others to explore when, how, and why the sexual revolution occurred. I simply note the massive impact on mores of the Pill and other modern contraceptive procedures. Science provided a generation that sought to distance itself from the past--the "hippie" generation--with the tools of liberation.
The Christian church found itself on the defensive. Suddenly the old arguments used to encourage young people to be chaste--fear of conception, fear of infection, fear of detection--no longer held water. They were bad arguments anyway; and Christian young people (and older ones, too) abandoned them and joined the sexual revolution.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the sexual revolution. Sex became a god, but the god didn't deliver.
If sex is the ultimate experience that it is trumpeted to be, if it liberates us and makes us so happy--how come most people today don't even look happy? If people are jumping in and out of bed at will with whom they please--and it seems as if they are--why are they so messed up?
Seventh-day Adventists surely have something to say about the sexual revolution. This is what I think we ought to be saying:
1. Sex comes from God, who made everything good. Sex isn't ugly or dirty; sex is a divine gift.
Adventists have a big advantage over many other Christians in this matter because of our theology. Others believe that the body is a container for an immortal soul--an idea that ultimately goes back to the ancient Greeks who believed that matter is evil and the soul good. But we Adventists hold that the Bible teaches a high view of the body per se, that we do not have a soul but that in our totality we are a soul, created in God's image.
Throughout most of Christian history the church taught at best an ambiguous view of sex. It held up celibacy as the higher vocation--a far cry indeed from Genesis 1-3. Even in modern times the church left Christians unsure as to the role of sex. When the revolution rolled in, the defenses crumbled.
Some Adventists no doubt feel squeamish about the topic of sex. But as early as 1974 Charles Wittschiebe authored a best-seller from our presses: God Invented Sex.3 It placed sex in a positive, joyful context.
2. The Genesis story puts sex in its true light. Here we find sexual relations described with simplicity, frankness, and beauty; and the setting is a loving, committed, lifelong relationship between a man and a woman.
3. Our bodies are the temples of Christ, made to glorify Him in all things. Paul writes: "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!" (1 Cor. 6:15, NIV).
Sex without commitment is mere passion. Only by following God's plan does this explosive force find its true fulfillment as the culminating expression of a loving relationship.
Let's start a Christian counterrevolution.
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1 "The Barna Update," Dec. 1, 2003. The numbers relate to people who do not have "a biblical worldview," that is, to almost the total population.
2 Philip Yancey, Rumors of Another World (Zondervan, 2003), p. 74.
3 Nashville: Southern Publishing Association, 1974.
