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SEX. Splashed across magazine covers, billboards, and computer screens--sex is casual, aggressive, and absolutely everywhere. And everybody's doing it, right?In Real Sex, heralded young author Lauren F. Winner speaks candidly to Christians about the difficulty--and the importance--of sexual chastity. With honesty and wit, she talks about her struggle to live a celibate life. Never dodging tough terms like "confession" and "sin," Winner grounds her discussion of chastity first and foremost in Scripture. She confronts cultural lies about sex and challenges how we talk about sex in church. Her biblically grounded observations and suggestions will be especially valuable to unmarried Christians struggling with the sexual mania of today's culture. Real Sex is essential reading for Christians grappling with chastity and a valuable tool for pastors.

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 juillet 2006
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441218278
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0461€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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real SEX
real SEX
the naked truth about chastity
L AUREN F. W INNER
2005 by Lauren F. Winner
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
Paperback edition published 2006
ISBN 978-1-58743-197-5
Fourth printing, December 2008
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Winner, Lauren F.
Real sex : the naked truth about chastity / Lauren Winner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-58743-069-X (cloth)
1. Chastity. 2. Sex-Religious aspects-Christianity. I. Title.
BV4647.C5W56 2005
241 .66-dc22 2004022537
Unless otherwise noted, scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version . NIV . Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture marked NRSV is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
This book is dedicated to the worshiping community of Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia
\Chas ti ty\, n. [F. chastet[ e], fr. L. castitas, fr. castus.]
1. The state of being chaste; purity of body; freedom from unlawful sexual intercourse.
- www.dictionary.com
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.
-C. S. Lewis
C ONTENTS
1. Unchaste Confessions: Or, Why We Need Another Book about Sex
Part One: Talking about Sex
2. Real Sex: Creation, Scripture, and the Case for Sex in Marriage
3. Communal Sex: Or, Why Your Neighbor Has Any Business Asking You What You Did Last Night
4. Straight Talk I: Lies Our Culture Tells about Sex
5. Straight Talk II: Lies the Church Tells about Sex
Part Two: Practicing Chastity
6. On the Steps of the Rotunda: Line-Drawing and Formation
7. Chastity as Spiritual Discipline: Conforming Your Body to the Arc of the Gospel
8. Communities of Chastity: What Singleness Teaches the Church
9. Responding to M.: The Practicalities of Repentance
Notes
Discussion Guide
Acknowledgments
Author s Note
1
U NCHASTE C ONFESSIONS
Or, Why We Need Another Book about Sex
Confession is a romantic form, not least because it presupposes that sin is still possible.
-Stacy D Erasmo
Chastity: it is one of those unabashedly churchy words. It is one of the words the church uses to call Christians to do something hard, something unpopular. It is a word that can set our teeth on edge, and it is the topic of this small book.
Chastity is one of the many Christian practices that are at odds with the dictates of our surrounding, secular culture. It challenges the movies we watch, the magazines we read, the songs we listen to. It runs counter to the way many of our non-Christian friends organize their lives. It strikes most secular folk as curious (at best), strange, backwards, repressed.
Chastity is also something that many of us Christians have to learn. I had to learn chastity because I became a Christian as an adult, after my sexual expectations and mores were already partly formed. But even 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.
I am not an expert on chastity. I am not a theologian or a member of the clergy. I m just a fellow pilgrim. What follows in this book is no more and no less than one person s reflections on the process of learning to practice chastity. I don t offer instructions or hard-and-fast rules. Instead, I offer a flawed example, a few suggestions, some thoughts about what works and what doesn t work, and the occasional reminder of why, as Christians, we should care about chastity in the first place.
An Autobiographical Excursion
My own history with chastity is nothing to be proud of. I first had sex when I was fifteen, with a guy I met at summer camp. We dated for three months, and had sex, but gradually our relationship dissolved-he went away to college, we wrote letters occasionally, but things fizzled out. A year later, I started college myself. And even though I was part of an observant Jewish community, I kept having sex. My freshman year, I dated a stunning man (he looked like an Armani model), and we had sex a few times. Then I began dating the man I now think of as my college boyfriend, and we had sex too. None of this behavior was sanctioned by my Jewish community, so I kept it pretty quiet. I didn t have communal approval, but through secrecy I managed to avoid outright censure.
And then, near the end of college, I began to explore Christianity. I popped in and out of churches. I spent time with the Book of Common Prayer. I read Christian novels. (In one, the second in the Mitford series by Jan Karon, the author makes clear that the unmarried characters are not having sex. Since we ve never discussed it, I want to say that I really do believe in doing things the old-fashioned way when it comes to love, explains Cynthia, a fifty-something divorcee, to her beau, an Episcopal priest. I do love you very dearly and want everything to be right and simple and good, and yes, pleasing to God. This is why I m willing to wait for the kind of intimacy that most people favor having as soon as they ve shaken hands. How quaint! I thought. Abstinence! Between members of the AARP! )
As I graduated from college and moved from New York to England for graduate school, I got pretty serious about Christianity, and about Jesus. I was going to church regularly by then, praying to Jesus, thinking about Him as I walked down the street, believing with a certainty that surprised me that He was who He said He was: God. I did some of the things you might expect someone who believes that Jesus is God to do. I got baptized. I started spending inordinate numbers of hours hanging around with other Christians. I read the Gospels. I prayed the psalms. I wore a small silver cross around my neck, proclaiming to passersby that I was part of this tribe whose allegiance was to Jesus. I knew that I was falling in love with this carpenter who had died for my sins.
But there were other things that you might expect a Christian to do, and I did not do them. (You might especially expect a Christian who had been an observant Jew and was therefore used to discipline, rigor, and religious authority to do these things, but still I did not do them.) I didn t forswear sex. I didn t tithe. I didn t especially enjoy going to church on Sunday mornings; in general, I had to grit my teeth, silence my alarm clock, and drag myself there.
I knew, dimly, that Christianity didn t look kindly on premarital sex, but I couldn t have told you very much about where Christian teachings about sex came from. I did read the letters of Paul, but to tell you the whole truth, I wasn t entirely sure what fornication meant, or how much leeway I had in interpreting it. In fact, I d never even actually heard the word fornication before reading the New Testament-it certainly wasn t common parlance among grad students at Cambridge University. I knew it had something to do with illicit sex, but I wasn t sure exactly what constituted illicit sex. Also, there was the problem of translations-what appeared as fornication in some Bibles appeared as the even more vague sexual immorality in others, which left me only with the ill-defined sense that the Christian God cared somehow about how His people ordered their sex lives.
It would not have been too difficult, of course, to get more clarity on this sex issue. I could have looked up fornication in the dictionary. Or I could have picked up any number of books designed to help readers just like me, new Christians, figure out the basics of Christian living. I didn t do those things for two reasons. First, sex was not immediately on my radar screen, as I hadn t met anyone I wanted to go to the movies with, much less go to bed with. Second, perhaps more important, I didn t really want to get more clarity on Christian sexual ethics, because I wanted, should the opportunity arise, the option of having sex.
So instead of digging deeper into the question of Christianity and sex, I settled for an easy conclusion: what God really cared about was that people not have sex that might be harmful in some way, sex that was clearly meaningless, loveless, casual. Yes, the context for sex mattered, but marriage might not be the only appropriate context. As long as everyone involved was honest, no false promises were made, no one got hurt; as long as sex was a sign of love and commitment, surely God would approve or, at least, not disapprove. That seemed doable-give up the occasional night of drunken revelry with some cute, random guy you met at a party, and reserve sex for truly committed relationships.
I more or less managed to abide by that. I didn t have sex until that truly committed relationship came along, and then when it did-when I met a man I ll call Q.-I did. Once, during the Q. months, I broke my own pledge, to God and to Q., having sex one night with an ex-boyfriend and then lying to Q. about it. I began to have some twinges of misgiving and went to talk to a minister I knew slightly, Pastor H. That conversation didn t get me very far. In hindsight, the best thing Pastor H. could have done was direct me to another pastor. Tucked away in a small country parish outside Cambridge, Pastor H. spent most of his time dealing with geriatrics, not