Yet, we have Jesus and his reconciling work. So, somehow it must make a difference in our sexual expressions. It has to impact and transform our understanding and practice of what we do with our bodies in the presence of God. Shouldn’t our sexual expression be a response to who God is in the work of Jesus?

However, I’m a little bit less sanguine about “tons of churches” not capitulating to the culture. Recently we’ve seen the Episcopal Church and the ELCA abandon Scripture and the Tradition in this area, and others, including some in the Evangelical and Emergent camps, seem to be following them like lemmings to the sea. Moreover, it’s not uncommon among Evangelicals to have an “anything goes” attitude to sex, so long as it’s within the confines of marriage. I’m not suggesting this is what Daniel has in mind – I respect him too much to impugn such a base understanding to him. But, as a mutual friend of ours who is in the thick of American Evangelical life puts it, far too many Evangelicals see their spouses, effectively, as their personal p*rn stars, and this falls far short of a biblical and traditional understanding of human sexuality.

Firstly, nice reflection on the topic. The contrarian in me just likes to see a popular buzzword taken to task a bit.

Authenticity, as you point out is insufficient as a criterion by itself. But that is because authenticity alone doesn’t mean anything. The question is “authentic to what?” A cuisine is “authentic” if it is highly similar to the same kind of food from the region it supposedly represents. A person being “authentic” must be being true to something. The natural assumption is that this is reflexive – we are being “authentic” to ourselves.

But who are we?

Here is where I would probably press you a bit. You present “the human” as fallen and sinful aspiring to a future christlikeness. I think a better presentation, artificially similar, is that in so far as we are fallen and sinful we are inhuman and therefore inauthentic. Jesus is the revelation of the fullness of humanity and as such it is in his person that we can learn who we really are and until we have realized that identity we are always inauthentic, false, unreal.

In essence we would agree that Christ is a necessary ethical criterion for judging our authenticity.

It probably has something to do with acknowledging that there’s a goal, a telos, and I am not there but we are all on a journey there together.

It probably entails confessing ways that all of us have been complicit in perpetuating the notion that our sexuality is at the heart of our identity (rather than one part of a very complicated whole). It might entail digging through some different forms that sexual dysfunction manifests itself, including the ones that aren’t directly tied to actualized sexual expression.

Those are a few thoughts, but I would seriously be interested in hearing what other folks think on this one. It’s a tough and important question.

On that score I don’t think the Roman church has any more of a leg to stand on than anyone else.

By everyone giving in to culture in a way that I’d approve of (as you intimate), do you refer to changes such as positions on birth control?

I can think of one Church whose teachings didn’t capitulate to the culture’s sexual mores and truly is counter-cultural, but based comments I’ve heard you make in the past, I doubt you want to hear that. Oh, and “martial mores”? Everything okay at home?