Mark Taylor | Echo
I liked our speakers for Sex and the Cornfields. Jay and Heather seemed sincere, engaging believers with a passion for their topic. However, I cared less for the way they chose to teach on sexuality in the Christian life. I found it deeply dissatisfying because, at its core, the week was not thoroughly bound to the Scriptures.
Take the second session, for example. Jay commented on how good sexual desires are, exhorting students to feel no shame over them. Indeed, this seemed to be the theme of the week: Don't feel weighed down by shame. Don't feel weighed down, they say, because the Lord made sex and he makes only good things. This is true, yet incomplete.
How can we be told, without qualification, not to feel shame when some things are shameful? Paul was aware of this when he wrote and warned those among the Galatians who used their bodies in shameful ways, "indulging the desires of the flesh." This indulgence made them into "children of wrath" before God. Shame is an appropriate reaction for shameful behavior.This is especially relevant to the students at Taylor because we are largely unmarried and thus committed to chastity. Any other behavior would be shameful for us. Sexual desires (at least, "sexual desires" meant in its traditional understanding; I and those I talked to could make little sense of the new, broader definition of sexuality espoused by the speakers) are required to go unsatisfied by our choice to honor God with our bodies. How does our commitment to chastity and our refusal to indulge in what is shameful relate to this perfect goodness which our speakers insist resides in our sexual desires? Perhaps these two views are compatible, but that isn't the point. The point is that a rigorously biblical approach was avoided in a favor of un-nuanced sentimentality.
Take two more examples. While teaching, Heather swore to make a point: She wanted to show in an "emphatic" way that the body is good. Furthermore, she went on to assert that she believed God also swore when he created because he thought what he had made was "emphatically good." Later, during the final session, Heather asked everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes; she then proceeded to pray to her own body, part by part. What are we to make of this perplexing and bizarre behavior?
Throughout the Scriptures, we are told that fearing God is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom-that those known as "God fearers" are the righteous. This fear is a deep reverence for the otherness and holiness of our mighty God, and it binds us from suggesting he might do anything crude or tarnishing. This same reverence prevents us from ever praying to anything or anyone but him. Heather's prayer to her own body and her suggestion that God might be profane were both improper and irreverent, completely out of place for a Christian but also especially for a teacher who, the Scriptures inform us, will be "judged more strictly."
Yes, she was probably only attempting to come up with an interesting way to comfort those whose sexuality and bodies have caused them pain. She almost certainly did not mean these comments literally or perhaps even seriously, but that isn't the point. The point is that everything the Scriptures have revealed to us about God tells us that such flippancy concerning the Holy One is entirely inappropriate and reveals a lack of seriousness when it comes to teaching in a way intimately connected to God's Word.
We do not need teaching that engages with a sliver of Scripture and then draws statements from it which merely induce positive emotions. We do not need teachers who are casually facetious when it comes to the seriousness of the Lord's holiness. What we need-urgently-is strong, thoughtful wisdom from God's Word that relies at every move on what our Father has revealed to us in that word. We need teachers of the Word, not merely motivational speakers.
