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Keeping It Real (Sex)

To Wait or Not to Wait?

Being a single Christian is weird. I was one until I was just a few months short of 27 years old. It's a strange kind of limbo: You think you might want to get married, but there's not a prospect on the horizon. Or maybe you wonder if marriage is all it's cracked up to be. You talk with your friends about sex. You'd really like to have sex, but you also want to honor God, so you don't. Or maybe you do and you feel guilty about it. Maybe you don't feel guilty and you wonder why.

Sometimes it really does feel like "everyone's doing it" — even Christians. And sometimes I Kissed Dating Goodbye doesn't answer your questions. And sometimes (this was the hardest thing for me) culture makes sex seem so selfish and lustful and commercialized that you wonder, "What is it, exactly, that I'm waiting for?"

I recently read a book that's really insightful in the areas of sex and purity. It's been out for a little while, but in case you haven't read it, I'll tell you why I think it's helpful.

The book is called Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity by Lauren Winner, and I'd say it's the best book I've read on chastity. Ever.

Let's Talk About Sex

Raised Jewish, Lauren came to faith in Christ at age 21. She had become sexually active at age 15, so, as she says, "I had to learn chastity because I became a Christian as an adult, after my sexual expectations and mores were already partly formed."

Part and parcel of that formation was her sexual experience, and, that being pertinent, she recounts the basics of her sexual history — numerous boyfriends and now, her husband, Griff. Few details are shared, and none of them are juicy. However, Lauren doesn't shy away from speaking directly about actions that express sexuality. They need to be discussed, but that it's important how they're discussed is not lost on Lauren, who knows she writes to a generation already steeped in sexual imagery, vocabulary and perhaps even experience.

Calling Christians on the Carpet

To those who have read about Real Sex without actually reading it, it might seem hypocritical for someone with a significant sexual history to be writing about chastity. The truth is quite to the contrary. While Lauren would beg her readers not to repeat the mistakes she made in pre-Christian moral ignorance, it is her history that allows her to present a mentally, physically and emotionally demanding theology of sex without being, well, demanding.

And, she notes, it's not only those with a sexual history who need to work through the formation of a biblical view of sex. Those who will make it (or have made it) to their wedding day as virgins often have a less-than-biblical view of sex nonetheless. As Lauren writes, "[E]ven many folks who grow up in good Christian homes, attending good Christian schools, and hanging out with good Christian friends — even these Christians-from-the-cradle often need to learn chastity, because unchaste assumptions govern so much of contemporary society." So we're all being called out. But don't worry, the author is right there with us.

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Do you think your Christian peers view sex and purity differently than the secular world?

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Lauren walks with her audience through the development of a biblical sexual ethic. For her, understanding chastity started with confession at her Episcopal church. When she confessed her sexual involvement with her boyfriend, her priest gently admonished, "Lauren, that's sin." It was a revelation — something she perhaps had known, but had previously been unwilling to admit to herself or anyone else.

This experience is why, in Lauren's eyes, true repentance is often at the heart of learning chastity. So, if you want to develop a theology of sexuality but aren't too keen on repenting and changing your behavior, you should not read this book. Though she represents a generation overdosed on therapy, Lauren does an exceptionally bad job of making her readers feel comfortable in their sin.

Instead, she leads them along the path she recently walked — from wondering "why chastity?" to grasping a big-picture view of sexuality as God designed it. And, she acknowledges, learning chastity takes time, the same as any other spiritual discipline. "Conversion," she writes, "makes one a new Christian, not a mature one, and though it effects a change in one's heart and one's very being, it does not usually effect an instantaneous change in all one's habits or assumptions." She expects that her readers will require time and discipleship before they are formed into the image of Christ in the area of sexuality, and she aims to offer guidance and encouragement to that end.

Getting to the Point

OK, let's get to the big questions.

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Where do you draw the line when it comes to the physical aspect of dating relationships?

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Where's the line? How can I avoid crossing it? How close can I get without stumbling over? Lauren addresses these questions, but not in a "tips and techniques" way. She requires her readers to think through the principles that lead to wise decisions in the physical arena.

A few things I particularly like about her approach:

• She draws heavily on Scripture. Emphatically opposed to proof texts, she takes the Word as a whole and paints a picture of humans as sexual beings created by a God who thinks our bodies are good. She digs into etymology where appropriate, and she holds up Scripture as authoritative and inspired. She asks her readers to develop a sexual ethic that does the same.
• She roots herself in Christian tradition, or what one of my former Bible professors referred to as "what all Christians everywhere have believed." This approach helps readers to lift themselves out of current social context and consider that biblical principles on sex apply no matter what the prevailing social trends dictate. Fornication is fornication whether it is glamorized or stigmatized. Marriage is marriage whether it is arranged by oneself or one's parents. And sex outside of marriage isn't sex in its fullest sense, no matter how many of one's peers are doing it.
• She shuns a relativistic, experience-centered approach, yet emphasizes that a proper theology of sex must consider the human experience. Lauren says, "We Christians insist that … sex was created for marriage alone and that unmarried Christians shouldn't have sex. But if we want to do more than insist — if we want to help those unmarried Christians inhabit chastity — we ought to know something about what role sex plays in their lives." With this, Lauren asks her readers to develop a practical theology of sex without idolizing pragmatism.
Lauren takes a high view of marriage as the only proper context for sex, and this is somewhat to her own surprise.
• Lauren takes a high view of marriage as the only proper context for sex, and this is somewhat to her own surprise. When she began writing this book, Lauren was a single person, writing to single people. She intended to write a book that was "the real deal about singleness" — one that wouldn't "make anyone feel icky by prattling on about marriage." But, even before she met and married her husband (though that did happen while she was writing the book), she recognized that a Christian theology of sex was incomplete without a discussion of marriage. Winner asks her readers to view sex in the context of Christian marriage, as remote as that may seem to many singles.

Readers of Real Sex are required to think deeply about their sexual ethics. But in the absence of easy answers, Lauren does at least provide some simple advice. Love one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. Don't ask, "Is it a sin to sleep next to my boyfriend/girlfriend if I'm fully clothed?" Instead ask, "How can I best show love? How can I be prudent? How can I be wise?" In incarnating this simple goodness, we discover how sex is really supposed to work.