Theology of sexuality vs. sexual theology

In response to a previous request, Katie Dawson pointed me to some resources about – to use my term – progressive sexual theology. In addition to a couple book titles, she sent a link to this course page for a class at a Canadian university.

I read some of the links on the page. The general tenor of the sexual theology – to be much too brief about it – is (1) we were created as sexual beings, (2) the church has forced on us a body/spirit divide, (3) God wants us to have joy and pleasure, (4) traditional sexual morals are patriarchal, (5) sexual experience is spiritual for many people, (6) people in the Bible had sex a lot and seemed to like it.

Overall, my impression is that the dominant source of the theologizing is experience. Most of the articles I read scarcely mention biblical sources for the conclusions reached. Here is perhaps not a typical passage but one that left an impression on me. It is a report by a pastor in the United Church of Canada on attending a conference for sex educators, counselors, and therapists.

The first keynote speech pulled the wool off the insincerity to which I had grown accustomed. In a delightfully frank exchange, world-renowned American sexologists Gina Ogden and Beverly Whipple presented data proving that sex is deeply spiritual.

Ogden, whose charisma could melt the ice off any soul, broke new ground in the field of sexology when she conducted a massive survey about the spirituality of sex. Instead of asking the usual below-the-belt questions (How often? How many climaxes?), Ogden inquired about the spiritual nature of sex, the connection between spiritual and sexual ecstasy and the conditions that make sex spiritually satisfying.

“The response,” she said, “was overwhelming.” Of the 3,810 respondents, 67 percent said that sex needs to be spiritual to be satisfying, 47 percent reported that they experienced God during sexual ecstasy and 45 percent claimed they experienced sexual energy during spiritual ecstasy. Remarkably, 1,465 of the respondents not only completed the surve but attached letters describing their sexual experiences. Of the 4,400 phrases they used, only 23 mentioned genitals. In fact, the language that they used to describe their most joyous sex was distinctly spiritual: “bliss,” “a joining of hearts,” “a revelation,” “a gift from God.”

“The clinical language of sexual science shrinks sex to what can be counted or measured — pulses, spasms, hormone levels, goals. In some ways, the language of spiritual experience comes closest to expressing the fullness of our sexual response for it is the language of connection and ecstasy,” Ogden writes in her latest book, The Heart & Soul of Sex (Shambhala Publications). “There are emotional and spiritual subtleties [in sexual experience] that engage our minds, hearts and spirits as well as our bodies.”

Note the emphasis on experience as the source of definition for what is spiritual. (A quote about Baalism by Eugene Peterson kept popping into my head as I read this.)

In a more explicitly theological mode, this article from a seminary professor explains the shifts he saw happening in the late 1980s.

Before the past two decades, the vast preponderance of Christian writers on sexuality assumed that the question before them was simply: What does Christianity (the Bible, the tradition, ecclesiastical authority, etc.) say about sexuality? Now we are also asking: What does our experience of human sexuality say about our perceptions of faith—our experience of God, our interpretations of Scripture and tradition, our ways of living out the gospel?

This shift derives in part from a recovery of 19th-century liberal theology’s emphasis on experience as important theological data—an emphasis now embraced by various forms of liberation theology. It derives, too, from the feminist and lesbian/gay movements, both of which have claimed that it is their consciousness of sexual oppression that has afforded them crucial insights about the ways of God in human relationships. The term “sexual theology,” like the term “liberation theology,” suggests this dialogical, two-directional investigation.

The two-way conversation model reminds us that theology cannot presume to look down upon human sexuality from some unaffected, Olympian vantage point. It reminds us that every theological perception contains some elements and perceptions conditioned by sexual experience, and every sexual experience is perceived and interpreted through religious lenses of some kind. The difference between a unidirectional and a dialogical method is the difference between a theology of sexuality and a sexual theology.

The first paragraph of the quote seems most telling to me. Bible, tradition, and church are pushed back to make room for experience as an equal – if not primary – source for theology. (This is why so many get edgy about the term “experience” in the much debated Wesleyan Quadrilateral, even though Wesley used the word in a much different way than the above writer.)

My conclusions are what I’m trying to find is a theology of sexuality, but what is dominant in the places I’m looking is sexual theology. This is a difference that probably explains a great deal why we have a hard time being in conversation about these questions.