Louis A. Ruprecht takes issue with the theology of a Baptist minister who has urged his married congregants to have more sex:
If this sounds almost magical, and too good to be true, then it probably is. Reverend Young gestures to Genesis, oddly enough, as a way to make his case. There is no shame in marital sex, he says; “God thought it up, it was his idea.”
These are theological howlers that simply cannot be allowed to pass. Adam and Eve weren’t married, for starters. And in Eden, there is no clear reference to their sexuality at all. Neither marriage nor marital sex “was God’s idea,” at least not there, in the beginning. In point of fact, God’s ideas had little to do with what transpired in the Garden of Eden. What happened there was a rebellion, and then expulsion from the Paradise-Garden. Shame was actually born there. And “the Woman” did not even receive her name until after the expulsion, when Adam gave her one. The name he gave her—Hava, or “Life-giver”—indicated that now they were going to have sex, and children… in the face of their own incipient and tragic mortality.
[…] To be sure, this is a news story in part because it links two phenomena we do not normally think together: evangelical Christianity, and the embrace of a shame-free sexual life.But the astonishing and utterly unreflective modernness of some of what Young proposes, coupled with the sheer vacuousness of the theology lying behind his “sexperiment,” should give evangelicals greater pause.
Read his entire post at Religion Dispatches and find the New York Times story on Reverend Young here.