…I kind of understand the eagerness to stake out this sort of \u201cmiddle of the road\u201d\u009d position on sexual ethics. It\u2019s the sort of \u201crespectable\u201d\u009d social conservatism that allows for everything sophisticated readers of The Atlantic might want\u201d\u201cseriousness and purpose without the backwardness of chastity.<\/p>\n
Or at least the appearance of seriousness, anyway. It also presupposes the sort of \u201cmake your own meaning\u201d\u009d approach to sex that stands beneath the sexual malaise in our culture. Consider this as a good rule of thumb: if you have to resort to describing your sex as \u201cmeaningful,\u201d\u009d then maybe that\u2019s because functionally its not. Meaning isn\u2019t made: it\u2019s discovered, lived out, revealed to us over the course of our lives. No writer sets out to write a \u201cmeaningful novel,\u201d\u009d or no very good writer does anyway. Because the meaning of things aren\u2019t determined by fiat. They inhere in things and we respond to them.<\/p>\n
Of course, to say that drives one into the possibility that maybe sex has a meaning in our lives that we don\u2019t get to decide. What that meaning is, of course, might be in question. The traditional Christian answer, I think, has been to tie sex to marriage, and marriage to babies. We\u2019re clearly losing the stomach for that one, though, both inside and outside the church. Still, the advantage of the traditional Christian sexual ethic is that it offers us sex without qualifications: sex in itself, the meaning given not made, in all its distinctive glory and freedom.<\/p>\n