Finding a Voice

Sam Berg was right. And David Guretzki, too. Both are my colleagues at Briercrest, and both have thought, written, and taught authoritatively about marriage, including sex. But I name Sam first because last year, when he presented a paper on a Christian perspective on marital sexual dysfunction, I asked what we can do to help singles with waiting. He answered that we need a richer, thicker theology of marriage. But how, I still wondered, along with several others in the room, does that help the singles? Lauren Winner has some ideas:

"True love waits" is not that compelling when you're twenty-nine and have been waiting, and wonder what, really, you're waiting for. (15)

Initially, I set out not to mention marriage at all in this book. For many of my own single years, I cringed when Christians talked about marriage. I was sick of hearing about nuptial bliss, sick of feeling as if I wasn't participating in authentic Christian life because I wasn't married, sick of feeling inferior to everyone who happened to be a wife. The book I write, I thought, won't have any of that. It will be the real deal about singleness, and it won't make anyone feel icky by prattling on about marriage.

But as I wrote, even before I met Griff [her husband], I realized there was a good reason that Christian conversations about sex often circle back to marriage. What sits at the center of Christian sexual ethics is not a negative view of sex; the Christian vision of marriage is not, at its most concise, merely "no sex before marriage." Rather, the heart of the Christian story about sex is a vigorously positive statement: sex was created for marriage. Without a robust account of the Christian vision of sex within marriage, the Christian insistence that unmarried folks refrain from sex just doesn't make any sense. And so I had to change my tack and write more about marriage than I had originally planned. I write about marriage because the core of this book is an effort to offer a definition, in a Christian vocabulary and grammar, of good sex, even (as the title suggests) of real sex. ...

I don't pretend to have a magic formula for ensuring premarital chastity. What I share in this book are some tools I wish I'd had sooner. My reflections come not only from my own experience, but from two years of conversations with pastors and counselors and lots and lots of single Christians. ... And so, though this book focuses on the topic of premarital chastity, it is not written only for the unmarried, for living chastely is a communal endeavor, one that requires the participation of the entire Christian community. And this book is also written for the whole Christian community because, if premarital chastity is my central topic, I also write about married sex. What does our belief that sex belongs in marriage teach us about what good married sex looks like? ...

... You will find that I have tried to articulate both the biblical vision of sex and the honest difficulties of living in this vision; I have tried to sketch both the tragedy of living outside the biblical vision and the hope for living within its bounds. And I have tried to evoke the beauty of desire, the beauty of how things were made. (25-26)

The bottom line is this: God created sex for marriage, and within a Christian moral vocabulary, it is impossible to defend sex outside of marriage. To more liberal readers, schooled on a generation of Christian ethics written in the wake of the sexual revolution, this may sound like old-fashioned hooey, but it is the simple, if sometimes difficult, truth. (29)