Sex Standards
The Christian Interpretation of Sex. By Otto Piper. (Nisbet. los. 6d.)
THIS, let it be said at once, is an unquestionably important book on an unquestionably important subject. Dr. Piper, who was deprived of his chair in the University of Munster in consequence of the courage with which he defended the rights of the Church against the State when the Nazis came into power in 5933, is now a professor in Princeton Theological Seminary. His approach to the problem of sex is very different from those generally familiar. Instead of considering current sex-doctrines or sex-practices and judging them by accepted Christian principles, so far as such principles exist, he pursues the much more positive line of con- sidering what the Biblical teaching (much more the New Testament than the Old) regarding sex is, and justifies the ideal so emerging by its bearing on the life of a wholesome and upright. society. Professor Otto's thesis. is closely argued and not easy to sum- marise. The essential point is that he sees sex as something as in no sense evil, except when given perverse expression, but funda- mentally good. Men and women are different from and comple- mentary to one another. It is by sexual intercourse, in which the whole being of each, spiritual as well as physical, is expressed, that they are made into a unity which leaves the personality of neither unchanged. The relationship, moreover, of a man to a woman• through whom he has ben initiated into the mystery of sex, and vice versa, is unique. Neither can ever stand in the same relation to anyone else (Dr. Piper does not quite face adequately the not uncommon cases of second marriages which are obviously happier than the first), and infidelity must inevitably vitiate the relationship by destroying its uniqueness. Starting from the declaration of the writer of the Book of Genesis that "God saw that it was not good for man to be alone," Dr. Piper reaches the conclusion that, " accord- ing to the Biblical point of view, sex, even on its physical side, is to be understood as the means by which God causes man and wife to become a unity. This divine purpose is the raison d'itre of sex life. The Bible regards it as a very special blessing of God that the couple have the additional possibility of obtaining children through their sexual intercourse. Therefore it does not regard sex life as being in need of an extra justification, such as the intention to propagate." This, of course, runs completely counter to Roman Catholic teaching.
Dr. Piper's book is not light reading, but it abundantly repays detailed study, for there are few volumes that come so near providing a religious doctrine of sex which is at once positive, constructive and illuminating. Unhesitatingly explicit where explicitness is needed and wisely restrained where it is not, the author succeeds admirably in handling a natural process with an unaffected naturalness. His book will seem to some a quarry to dig from, to others a finished structure that can be accepted as it stands. Both will find it equally
Previous page
