What Was This Body and Sould Made For? A Review of Peter Jones, The God of Sex: How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality. Wheaton: Victor, 2006.

"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 creation's structures. It offers the "liberation" of sex from its heterosexual complementary essence. The Christian gospel proclaims that redemption is reconciliation with the Creator and the honoring of creation's goodness. This gospel celebrates the goodness of sex within its rightful, heterosexual limits.

Part One, as we have seen, covers the first part of this argument; Part Two, "Sexuality According to the Biblical Worldview," addresses the second.

Spread over six chapters, Part Two walks through the biblical testimony on sex, contrasting it with what Jones calls the "pagan monism" view that teaches that there is no god and that all is one without any distinction between Creator and creation. Using a Schaefferian approach that emphasizes antithesis between Christianity and all other systems of belief, Jones offers a basic theology of God, sketching the character of the One who rules sex just as He rules all of the cosmos (108-18). He then covers the biblical view of the body, the marital covenant, and the marital act (119-38). Next Jones considers Paul's words to the Romans on the subject of homosexuality, observing in the course of the section that "[t]hose who reject the Creator also reject the notion of the created ‘natural' order. If there is no Creator, there are no norms or boundaries," for "[h]omosexuality destroys the heterosexual separation that God has placed between male and female." This "joining together of the opposites that God has separated is both a radical rejection of creational norms and a powerful spiritual expression of pagan monistic rebellion" (147). This is a crucial passage, for it illustrates that sexuality is not an arena for personal experimentation and expression but is the forum in which God calls humanity to embrace in the most fundamental manner the contours of His wise and elegant design.

The author continues by exploring the way in which God "recreates" humanity through His Son and Spirit, observing that the Christian, the new creation of God, fundamentally heeds the Creator's call to a life of submission to God's will (158-67). Jones then calls the Christian to observe not a set of sexual do's and don'ts, but a way of life that simultaneously celebrates sex and obeys the Creator's directions concerning sexual morality (174-77). Such a way of life will bring sanctification and allow the Christian to fit rightly into the role reserved for the redeemed by the Lord (178-88). In the end, "while human disobedience stains us with sin and condemns us to death, God's purposes in creation will ultimately—through the amazing grace of his redemption action in Christ—have the last word" (198).

The God of Sex is a helpful, richly theological meditation on the consequences of both the pagan and Christian worldviews. Jones succeeds in his quest to show that spirituality and sexuality are directly related. He also proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that paganism begets all manner of evil and perversion, that Christianity offers the only sane and beautiful worldview and sexual perspective known to man, and that these two options or "gospels," in some form, confront every person. Clearly trained as a worldview thinker, Jones avoids mere denunciation and moralizing in his text and consistently points the reader to the true gospel and the glorious metanarrative of life and thought into which sexuality fits.

Readers will find the second half of the book particularly helpful. Gifted with a creative mind and a command of the biblical material, Jones delves into various texts of Scripture and unearths a number of gems that illumine the passages. To cite just a few (and there are many more), Jones addresses the healing nature of a cohesive understanding of life and sexuality (134-35); discusses the importance of a creative function in an ideal sexual relationship (149); looks insightfully at the temptation of utopianism (157); shows how God is both Creator and re-Creator, a fascinating duality of roles (159); and covers the awesome nature of heaven as it relates to our future roles (168). In these and a number of different places, Jones gives the reader a fresh perspective on familiar concepts and helpfully introduces others. One comes away from the text with a broadened understanding of sexuality and, even more significantly, the Christian's status as a new creation in Christ.

Made as physical creatures, with strong appetites and natural desires, the race of men must inevitably confront the matter of sexuality. Possessing a soul, with a spirit created by almighty God, mankind is also inherently spiritual—unable, however hard he may try, to avoid the Creator and the implications of His existence. As Jones has shown, these personal realities intertwine. The way one approaches sex reveals the way one approaches God; the way one relates to God shapes the way one relates to sex. One approach frees mankind and places him under the loving care of his Creator; the other promises liberation but ensnares him for destruction. If sex and spirituality seem disconnected now, it is apparent that our conception of their relationship echoes into eternity, either hurtling us toward God or sending us far from His love.