Fifty-Three-Year-Old Sex

Parishioners make the most fascinating choices when giving me books for gifts. This Christmas I received Sex and Love in the Bible by William Graham Cole (1959), then Professor of Religion at Williams College.

The erudition, depth, and eloquence of this book are as close to flawless as one could hope. It will inspire thought in anyone who reads it, and I daresay ought to be read by anyone who wants seriously to discover how biblical faith interacts with sexuality. The book is also now fifty-three years old. Though its theological insights are timeless, the issues with which it struggles--or perhaps better, the ways in which it struggles--are now historical.

The occasion for the book was the publication of the Kinsey Reports (1948 and 1953), which seem to be the first sociological research in the United States that asked about all expressions of sexual activity in our culture. It broke taboos by asking about masturbation, homosexuality, and age of first coitus. It set moralism largely aside and sought the facts of folks' behaviors. Starting with a recognition that the Kinsey Reports revealed something important about American society, Cole made it his task to offer a biblical response to the Reports. His conclusions many of us have come to accept as par for the course; his assumptions about the bible reveal his location in time and are still tensions within much of the Church. Here are the major conclusions I found.

Sex is good. Cole calls this a "concession" to the Kinsey Reports, but based on solid scriptural support. He believes the Church of the Victorian Age needed to be corrected from its prudery.
Parents must educate their children about the goodness of sex. Rather than hide behind obscure references to "birds and bees," children will grow up healthier if they understand sex and its role as soon as they can.
For Christians, all things are lawful, but not all things are wholesome. Cole falls solidly on the side of liberty rather than moralism: decisions about what is right and wrong in sexual relationships ought to be made based on the inner motivations rather than strict moral categories. This is still a tension within the Church--regarding sex and so many other things.
Sex cannot be disconnected from relationship. Cole rails against the Kinsey description of sexual encounters as simple "contacts." Every time sexual activity happens, whole persons are involved (whether they want to be or not). He establishes a firm biblical grounding for this view.
The bible is not an inerrant set of rules, but a vehicle by which the Holy Spirit speaks. With clear self-awareness, Cole places himself over against the Fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century and firmly in the camp of historical-critical scholars who, at the time, were considered "liberal" by most of the Church. This divide, now tessellated by several additional factors, still exists in the Church.
Psychology is the profession which best deals with sexual abnormalities like homosexuality. Cole reveals a strong bias to the then-still-established cultural standard of heterosexuality as normalcy. There is no hint in Cole's writing of the possibility that homosexuality can be a natural state for human beings. He also betrays a great optimism--in my view, characteristic of his time--that with enough education and therapy every human being can be on the road to a normal, enjoyable sex life. Learning and psychotherapy are the keys to redemption of the aberrant; the roles of the Spirit, the Church, and the pastor are simply to ensure that folks get the right education and find the right therapist. Though education and psychotherapy are good--along with all "things" which Cole asserts are good in themselves--such optimism sounds hollow a half-century later.

Again, anyone interested in solid exegesis of the bible with respect to love and sex will be enriched by this book. And perhaps readers from the twenty-first century will see their own biases more clearly because of the distance we now experience from those of Kinsey and Cole.

Thanks, Steve, for passing this one along.

~ emrys