Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 14:1 (Spring 2009)
Article: What Was This Body And Soul Made For?
Author: Owen D. Strachan

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JBMW 14:1 (Spring 2009) p. 76

What Was This Body And Soul Made For?

A Review of Peter Jones, The God of Sex: How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality.

Wheaton: Victor, 2006.

Owen D. Strachan

Managing Director, Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Deerfield, Illinois

“God and sex,” says Peter Jones, “make an odd couple.” So begins Jones’s 2006 publication, The God of Sex: How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality. “God,” Jones notes, “represents disembodied, ethereal holiness,” while “sex is the very essence of hard-driving material pleasure” (9). This observation begins The God of Sex, a text that is one part cultural overview and another part biblical theology of sex. Authored by a professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California, The God of Sex offers a sexually confused world an incisive exploration of the relationship between God and sex.

In Part One of the text, “Sexuality According to the Pagan View of God,” Jones covers in five chapters the unbelieving approach to sex and to God. Jones first provides a bit of background on the cultural revolution that occurred in the 1960s, tracing the devolution of traditional views on sexuality to Alfred Kinsey and his studies of American sexual practices (20-21). In Kinsey’s wake, traditional mores have collapsed, leaving Western culture awash in pornography. Abortion and homosexuality proliferate, cohabitation replaces marriage, and cultural elites trumpet the arrival of countless forms of sexual identity (22-31). This project of perversity receives the untiring support of a wide variety of spiritualities (35-42).

The God of Sex then addresses what Jones calls “the coming sexual utopia,” an era in which relativism reigns and all boundaries regulating sexual practice collapse (47-55). As “deep religious notions are overthrown and replaced by conflicting religious ideas,” gender loses all meaning and takes the form of a social construct (55). Accordingly, a shared societal sense of sexual propriety quavers in the wind; the spreading acceptance of “polyamory” threatens a day when all regulations concerning sexual practice fade away (60). Homosexuality’s cause proves relentless in our soft-bellied culture and offers the world a new spirituality (70-81). All of these trends threaten children most significantly, as they are powerless before them (91-97).

Jones switches tracks on page 99, where he sums up his argument:

The pagan gospel preaches that redemption is liberation from the Creator and repudiation of crea...

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