Strange Sexual Obsessions
Monday, June 30th, 2008I don’t think there’s anything weirder than religious sexual obsession. Sex is tough enough without layering our obsession about it with some bizarre religious viewpoint. Jim Jones was obsessed with sex. Reportedly he had sex with both the women and the men of his cult. David Koresh couldn’t keep his hands off his female followers. The Eldorado group of radical polygamists had their dirty little secret of sex between older men and young teenage girls in a twisted wedding ritual where the other men of the cult could watch “the first time.”
Like sex, religion is tough to keep squared away without it being overrun with bizarre social and personal viewpoints. Flannery O’Connor aptly said it, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” I don’t think she was inviting us to turn weirdness into an art form and blessing it in the name of God. I think she was holding up a mirror so we would see ourselves more clearly and realize how we can take something as the goodness of our faith in God and turn it into Six Flags Over Jesus.
Over the years since the takeover of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the ickiest viewpoints about sex and procreation and pleasure have been lurking in the theological minds of the President and professors who teach there. Once a viable center of creative and respectable theological thinking, now we are subjected to the strangest of sexual obsessions that focus on the means and motives of sex slimed by the notion they claim to represent the viewpoints of the God who created sex. Remember, this is the seminary that openly defended the torture of prisoners of war by our government as a means of self-defense in the world of terrorism. One is left to ponder what it means that both viewpoints are held by the same professors of theology and about the theological worldview that is now forming the faith and thinking of those who study there.
The latest weirdness to come from Southern Seminary involves how women are initiators of their own spousal abuse by being rebellious to the sacred order of obedience to their man. More about that later…
In the past few years, the greatness of the seminary has been reduced to an obsession with procreation and filling the wombs of young Christian women who are submissive in bed as an act of their commitment to God. The Southern faculty advocate that Southern Baptist young women must serve as willing sexual partners with their husbands … making babies as often as God (as in the life-giving reproductive powers of nature) wills as millions of sperm attack and bombard the single ovulated egg. Why would the theological professors at Southern have such an interest as to make pronouncement on behalf of a God they envision as a fertility God? Why would these professors make pronouncements that God wills for these young women to be so open to their own fertility as to spurn birth control methods as acts of disobedience? Such a theology they call “a full quiver theology” meaning the quiver of a man is filled with the arrows of the offspring they sire with their obedient wives.
These Southern professors have also condemned the rebellion of young Southern Baptist men and women who might choose not to marry until they are older. Again waiting until they are ready is deemed as disobedience and condemned as if such condemnation was according to the eternal plan of God. Is there no wisdom to waiting until they are prepared to marry and bear children? Should there not be some gladness to such wisdom from our young adults who would thoughtfully enter into marriage and creating a family? Does it matter much to the rest of us when they make this choice?
Back to the latest weirdness at hand … this past Friday, a report was carried on www.ethicsdaily.com of a sermon preached recently by Bruce Ware, professor of Christian theology, at the Denton Bible Church pronouncing that women bring physical abuse by their husbands upon themselves by their desire to have their own way rather than submitting to the authority of their husbands. There’s only the thinnest of blame offered to women who suffer brutality at the hands of their abusive husbands he claims is linked to Eve’s sin of rebellion in the Garden of Eden. Men whose wives demonstrate such rebellion often act in one of two ways, claims Professor Ware. They either react in strength and beat their wives, or they acquiesce and become weak male partners with their domineering wives.
Dr. Ware needs to have his head examined. He and the others who share these views need therapy and should be banned from teaching the next generation of ministers who sit at their feet learning about God, about human pain and suffering.
Warning signs should be posted at the entrance of the seminary: “Warning! Sexual Obsessions Abound Here … Enter at Your Own Peril!”
