SYNOPSIS

An Account of the History and Theology of Sexuality

Patrick Yu

Patrick Yu puts the question this way: “If, morally speaking, everything else is equal between two sexual relationships, does gender matter?” The history of the discussion, up till recently, has been, “yes, it matters very much.”

Gender is part of our being, Yu argues. Individually we are either male or female, but as a species we are male and female. “When a man and a woman make love, they act out the universal need each and every man has of woman, and woman man, in every sphere of life.” When society tries to bypass this context, in the quest for androgyny, or individual autonomy, it substitutes an artificial creation for God’s own.

Our society crossed a watershed with the invention of birth control. Intimacy has become the principle end for sex and procreation has become an optional add-on. That is an enormous shift, historically and theologically.

The tying of sexuality almost exclusively with intimacy has another consequence in our contemporary culture. Yu laments the loss of the idea of friendship. With the sexual revolution the boundary between friendship and sexual intimacy has been blurred. Society seems to promote the idea that sexual intercourse is the logical conclusion in a continuum of increasing intimacy.