Content area
Full text
Dennis P. Hollinger. The Meaning of Sex: Christian Ethics and the Moral Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009. 272 pp. $19.99, ISBN 9780801035715.
Although Christian ethics masquerades sometimes as a discrete discipline, it is understood better as an ambitious multidisciplinary enterprise, requiring knowledge of (at the very least) biblical studies, theology, philosophy, and the social sciences. Dennis P. Hollinger 's The Meaning of Sex draws on material from across all these fields as he articulates and defends the traditional Christian thesis that "sex is a good gift of God with very specific purposes, and those purposes best find their fulfillment in a very specific context - the marriage of a man and a woman" (13). The position he stakes out will be very familiar to most evangelical scholars, as will most of the arguments he presents in support of it.
In Part I, Hollinger lays the theoretical foundations for Part II's treatment of several controversial issues in sexual ethics. Chapter 1 characterizes three families of ethical theory briefly: consequentialism, deontology (principle ethics), and character /virtue ethics. In chapter 2 Hollinger introduces readers to five worldviews - asceticism, naturalism, humanism, monism, and pluralism - and then he discusses the implications of each for the meaning of sex. These first two chapters are largely polemical. Hollinger highlights well-known problems with each of the three branches of ethical theory and argues that no ethical theory has the resources to address the problems of sexual ethics unless it is embedded in a larger worldview. He contends further that all of the five worldviews he considers are problematic and none of them "can truly produce authentic sexual morality as God intended" (68).
Chapters 3 and 4 present Hollinger 's positive sketch of a Christian worldview and explore the nature and meaning of sex within that framework. In chapter 3 Hollinger uses the categories of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation to narrate what Scripture says about sex. The physical and sexual dimensions of humanity are part of the good gifts of God's creation; in particular, human relationality, which includes sexuality, is an aspect of the imago Dei. However, like the rest of creation, human sexuality is fallen, and our broken sexuality is manifested in distorted relationships with God, self, other,...