The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity

Afterword

297 Afterword Serene Jones i hAd the privilege of being present at this book’s beginning: a Workgroup on Constructive Theology conference convened in Nashville several years ago.1 Fifty theologians from around the country had gathered, as we do every year, to wrestle with topics pertinent to present-day life. That year, the provocative title of our meeting was “Sex as a Daily Practice.” After our understandable (for many of us, middle-aged) chuckles died down, we began talking about this issue with a level of honesty and seriousness that is rare in the theological academy and church today. We were motivated not only by our own varied life experiences but even more by the painfully honest questions some of us have gotten from our students: Should I have sex with so and so? Am I a virgin if I’ve had oral sex? Can I become a virgin again? Should I hook up? Should I be abstinent if I love Jesus? Is it okay to not know the person with whom you spend the night? Is it okay to like sex? Or not to? Can I love a boy and love a girl? At the same time? And same place? 298 The Embrace of Eros I’m really lonely, really. Very lonely. Can you help? I want to have sex. I don’t want to have sex. What is sex? What does God think about all this? Can you give me some guidance, please? These student questions were both heart wrenching and matter-of-fact, and they were urgently asked, as quite possibly questions about sex have always been. Vulnerable passions provoke vulnerable passions. With their earnest questions in hand, we set before ourselves the very practical task of trying to address sex concretely and theologically at the same time. That not-so-simple task set us on a three-year journey that in the end produced many of these remarkable pages. From the start, our discussions faced three challenges. The first involved our need to confess a failure. As progressive theologians who are supposedly open to discussions of sexuality, we realized that we had failed to talk explicitly about many of the topics to which our students needed answers. This failure was made painfully evident to us the minute our conversations began. Our group is made up of scholars whose perspectives span the wide left side of the theological spectrum: liberation theologians, queer theologians, womanist and feminist theologians, black theologians, Latina and mujerista theologians , process thinkers, progressive evangelical voices, and the list goes on. Given these orientations, it was not surprising that we immediately homed in on sexual ethics and the role of power relations in erotic interactions. We agreed that consent should be the nonnegotiable starting point for any form of faithful sexual intimacy; that sex should take place between rational adults; that race, class, gender, and sexual orientation dramatically affect the nature of that consent; and that many social relations (pastor–parishioner, employer– employee, teacher–student) render consent too complex to be facilely managed and should be prohibited. We also agreed that throughout history, religious understandings of sexuality have been shot full of exclusions, repressions, silences, and eccentricities that, as theologians, we needed to surface and engage. We similarly shared a view that sexual orientation and identity have been socially constructed across the centuries in ways both destructive and compelling and, as such, should remain for us an open issue. On all these points, there was ardent agreement. In order to grasp the nature of our agreement, imagine the word sex written in bold letters in the middle of a big, blank sheet of paper. Our collective hand could easily draw a very large red circle around it, a good five inches away from the center. The circle symbolically represents the firm, clear limits that our ethical justice-centered theology could place around sex. To be just, Afterword 299 you should not have these kinds of relations. The circle marked a border we all agreed on—a line that managed the flow of appropriate and inappropriate relations across it. After we finished drawing our metaphoric red circle, a strange and awkward silence fell. Okay. Now what? We found ourselves staring at the big open area that filled the space inside the red circle. We weren’t quite sure what should go there. Maybe nothing, maybe lots. It was hard to decide how to...