Excerpt: “Pagan Sexuality at the Center of the Contemporary Moral Crisis”

                                                                                                                            
Comments by  T. C. Pinckney                                                                                                                  Vol. XV, No. 1, January 2002

Southeast Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, publishes a journal semiannually, titled Faith & Mission. Each issue consists of five or six articles and numerous book reviews. You can subscribe by writing Faith & Mission, SEBTS; P.O. Box 1889; Wake Forest, NC 27588; or by e-mailing dlanier@sebts.edu. One year is $10, two years $18.

The following excerpt is from an article of the same name in the Spring 2000 Faith & Mission by Daniel R. Heimbach, Professor of Christian Ethics at Southeastern.

“... in pagan thinking , the natural is believed to be so permeated with supernatural power that supernatural forces controlling the universe can be centered and steered by manipulating natural objects. Accordingly, paganism seeks truth through subjective experience, feeling, and intuition. Deep wisdom is something apprehended experientially, through acts of the body, and authenticated by sensation and emotion. For pagans there is no knowledge of wisdom or truth apart from what individuals grasp in the body through feeling and sensation. Thus reason and morality always follow – and can never restrict – what the body experiences.

“As a result, while paganism certainly celebrates the discovery of religious meaning in life, it does so in a way that is characteristically self-deifying, and pagan morality is highly sensual. Indeed, because the pagan mind believes supernatural power can be centered and controlled by manipulating rhythms of biological life, sexual indulgence is embraced as a moral ideal. Individuals grow in spiritual power and moral attainment the more they participate in sex acts that break away from restrictive expectations. For this reason, pagan deities tend to be intensely sexual, and pagan worship often features cult prostitution.

“In pagan thinking, salvation has to do with entering into experiences that enable men and women to discover, or center, deity in themselves. In their view, God is in us because we are god, and the obstacle that most hinders us from realizing this truth is mistaken belief in fixed distinctions – between married and unmarried, between male and female, between God and man, between natural and supernatural, between life and death. ... In other words, sexual indulgence is sacralized as a means of salvation, and what paganism values most highly is what the Bible calls sin – sex that unites the unmarried, sex that unites persons of the same gender, and sex that unites human life with animals.”

Paganism is one of the strong currents flowing through American culture today. The above helps us understand much of what we see around us in the media and people we know.