"A viable sexual theology for our time will affirm that human sexuality is always much more than genital expression. Sexuality expresses the mystery of our creation as those who need to reach out for the physical and spiritual embrace of others. It expresses God's intention that we find our authentic humanness not in isolation but in relationship. It is who we are as bodyselves experiencing the emotional, cognitive, physical, and spiritual need for intimate communion with others, with the natural world, with God.
"Such theology will understand our sexuality as intrinsic to the divine-human connection, as one of the great arenas for celebrating the Source of Life. Hence sexuality will enter directly and consciously into our understandings of every major Christian doctrine — God, human nature, sin, salvation, history, and eschatology. For example, we shall need to attend more fully not only to the manifold ways in which our sexuality conditions our perceptions of God (through gendered lenses, for instance), but also to the manifold ways in which the divine-human relationship is permeated with sexual elements, both in our sin and in our salvation. Such theology will understand our sexuality as capable of expressing our intended destiny for freedom, creativity, vulnerability, joy, and shalom. Such sexual theology will express the prophetic critique on every institutional and cultural arrangement that sexually distorts and oppresses; it will be grounded in commitments to equality, justice, and fulfillment.
"The ethics that flow from this theology will embrace one standard for evaluating sexual expressions. I believe that standard is love, multidimensional in its reality, with epithymia (sexual desire), eros (hunger for fulfillment), philia (friendship), and agape (self-giving) its necessary aspects. No one of those dimensions can be slighted. It is love that is respectful, egalitarian, socially responsible, caring, faithful, honest, and just. Our understanding of such love will be rooted in scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, each source informing, enriching, sometimes correcting the others. Such a central principle of love will welcome numerous presumptive or prima facie rules tor guiding our sexual behaviors, but will be wary of specific absolutes that are believed exceptionless and invariant regardless of the context. It will be a single standard, applicable to all persons. Through its acceptance of double standards, unfortunately, the church has done its share of sexually dehumanizing whole groups of persons. Thus, there are many sexual 'strangers in the land,' consigned to the Egypts of sexual oppression, strangers whom the biblical witness bids be treated with equality and hospitality.
"Of particular importance in our time is the reclaiming of the much-neglected, much-feared erotic dimensions of love. Fearing that to embrace eros would mean a sanctification of the selfish quest for our own satisfaction, we have too frequently collapsed all meanings of love into agape. We need to recapture a vision of the divine eros as intrinsic to God's energy, God's own passion for connection, and hence also our own yearning for life-giving communion and our hunger for relationships of justice which make such fulfillment possible."
