The Theology of Sexuality Applied:

1. The Theology of Sexuality Applied: Teaching/Training of Youth in the Home and the Church

2. What are our Objectives in Sex Education and in Parenting? … to prevent immorality? … to equip and empower our children to enter adulthood capable of living godly, wholesome, and fulfilled lives as Christian men and women, Christian singles, wives and husbands

3. Deuteronomy 6:1-9 These are the commands, decrees and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your fathers, promised you. Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

4. Key Points in the Theology of Sexuality • We are embodied. • We are gendered, sexual beings. • We are relational. • We are made in God's image. • We are broken and twisted. • We encounter objective reality when we have sex. • We are souls under construction.

5. We are souls under construction • Given/Discovered or Constructed? • Given: Evolutionary PsychologyReproduction as an evolutionary impulse in the context of a meaningless universe; sex, like life, is meaningless

6. We are souls under construction • Pure Construction: “If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question is not whom they love, but who they are – that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.” “Generation LGBTQIA” Michael Schulman; New York Times

7. We are souls under construction • Pure Construction: “The ultimate prize to be wrung from all these baffling sexual predicaments is a deeper understanding of oneself.” “We can only justify our freedom by giving full attention to the human relationships formed by sex, even if those are relationships are brief or strange.” Elaine Stair; New York Review of Books

8. We are souls under construction • Pure Construction: "The will, we habitually assume, is sovereign to the degree that it is obedient to nothing else and is free to the degree that it is truly spontaneous and constrained by nothing greater than itself. This, for many of us, is the highest good imaginable. And a society guided by such beliefs must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate … the nonexistence of any transcendent standard of the good that has the power (or the *right*) to order our desires toward a higher end….For us, it is choice itself, and not what we choose, that is the first good.“ David Hart in Atheist Delusions

9. We are souls under construction • Given, Discovered and Constructed: “Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor . . . [America is] a vast republic of escaped slaves [,] . . . [of] the masterless.” D. H. Lawrence

10. The Five-Factor Model of Sexual Character

11. Twelve Principles ofChristian Sex Education Principle 1: Sex education is the shaping of character. Principle 2: Parents are the principle sex educators. Principle 3: First messages are the most potent. Principle 4: Seize those “teachable moments;” become an “askable” parent.

12. Twelve Principles ofChristian Sex Education Principle 5: Stories are powerful teaching tools. Principle 6: Accurate and explicit messages are best. Principle 7: Positive messages are powerful. Principle 8: “Inoculate” your children against negative beliefs.

13. Twelve Principles ofChristian Sex Education Principle 9: Repetition is critical; repetition is really, really important. Principle 10: Close, positive parent-child relationships are crucial. Principle 11: Sexuality is not everything; keep your perspective. Principle 12: Our God can forgive, heal, and redeem anything.

14. Barriers to Character Formation in Christian Families and Christian Churches • Latent gnostic spirituality • Discomfort and presumed incompetence • Infantile hope of control by ignoring • Protestant failure to fully understand process of formation • Political volatility and risk of profound moral disagreements

15. Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt 1945 With great pain we say: By us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries. That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole church: We did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the Nationalist Socialist [Nazi] regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.