Reorganized and Slightly Fictionalized Excerpts of a Conversation Had in Barnes and Noble.

"Wait, so you're saying that you take an unusual position on sex."

"No no, what I'm saying is that the way we talk about sex in the church is absolutely nonsensical- taking a "position" on sex, if we are honest about what sex is, is like taking a position on food! There may be a way to deal with food that affirms eating in its fullness and a way that promotes unhealthiness, and the same may be said of the way we deal with sex, but surely we cannot consider separately the concept of pizza from the whole experience of a life dependent on nourishment any more than we can separate the act of intercourse from the whole experience of sexual relationships and consider it independently."

"Ok."

"Why then, is our entire dialogue as a church enslaved to a discussion of parts as removed from a whole? Dealing only with intercourse is like labeling a 3 square mile section of ocean on a map and expecting that distinction to be meaningful as anything other than a label on a map. I am not interested in claiming that sex "does not matter." Instead, I am saying that the way we deal with sex, the way we look to interact sexually in a way that affirms life as a weighty affair, cannot begin and end with our idolatrous focus on a single act as a sort of behavioral test of Christianity. We take the act of intercourse and call that sex, and talk about it, take positions on it, build up systems around it, all while ignoring the fact that sexuality is a part of life that is deeply ingrained in our way of interacting with the world around us. Clearly, I am no longer speaking of sex, and speaking of the range of human life and relationships, which we seem to want to separate into pieces so that we might more easily consider the merits of those pieces independent of context. I consider this crazy talk."

"I think that makes sense. In a way it is highly representative of our desperate need to grasp (I use the word grasp to deliberately bring to mind both understanding and possessing/controlling, because for us, our need to understand is very linked to our need to control) things in general. It reminds me of economics- we make models of things that are too big for us to comprehend, because it is our only way to bring them down to a size we can wrap our heads around. In a way, this is all we can do, so modelmaking isn't necessarily a problem. The problem is that we don't make our models humbly, waiting for them to be torn down, because they are models after all. instead we expect the thing we're making a model of to be limited by and act in accordance with out model, and it's very hard not to blind ourselves to the inadequacies of our models, so dependent we are on them."

"We're talking about God now, aren't we."

"When were we not?"