Christianity and Sexuality

Christianity and Sexuality

Introduction

Sexuality is a sensitive issue for which people perception and attitude defines the willingness to discuss the concept backgrounds and consequences. In open culture societies, people take adaptive approach to share their views on this particular concept. In culturally bounded societies cultural norms and expectations from a person defines the significance of the issue. In many Asian countries, a restricted and closed cultural system has been seen when it comes to discussing the sexuality in general and specific terms. This paper examines the rationale of the concepts formation in Americans and Asian and the proceeding impact on the messages that surrounds the concept of sexuality (Thielicke, 2000).

Essentialist point of view states that our sexual behaviors are formed from our genetic structuring. Contrastingly, sociologists present social constructionist viewpoint towards sexuality and its principles that suggest sexuality is a part of reality that forms our social world. This essay seeks to explore some of many aspects that make surround sexuality in societies that are moving towards socialist constructivist viewpoint such as in American culture. Asian cultures are bounded by their old customs and traditions which restrict the person to openly share his views and discuss the concerns with others related to sexuality.

In general terms, sexuality is defined as any form of pleasure which is or can be derived from body. Due to nature of our environment, it is essential, but never entirely satisfied concept. Although formation of factors related to sexuality is not completely defined but strong concern of person towards cultural norms do restrict his perspective towards such concepts (Gudorf, 1994).

Discussion

The term 'sexuality' is a recent import into Christian theology and its theological uses remain unsettled. For theologians working in English, it began to gain currency only after 1950, when the cultural prominence of both psychoanalysis and sexological research pushed the term and its topics into academic speech. The term is now widely used in English-speaking theology, but its popularity has not made it any clearer. Like many of the concepts that theologians have borrowed from new sciences, 'sexuality' brought with it a confused history.

When 'sexuality' passed soon thereafter into Christian theology, it often carried sexological or psychoanalytic connotations, but it also continued to serve as a euphemistic generalization for the whole of human erotic life. What is theologically significant is that in both its clinical and its generalized meanings, the term named human sexual desire and behaviour in relation to the pursuit of pleasure rather than procreation. It thus presented in miniature an old puzzle for Christian thinking: what are the created status and present moral value of sexual pleasure itself? When theologians began to speak of sexuality, they often betrayed their difficulty in conceiving erotic pleasures apart from the procreative purposes that Christianity had so long invoked to justify them (Douglas, 1999).

Sexuality is certainly a subject of great complexity. Not only because it is inescapably rooted in human nature, but also because the thought that there on this point, greatly influence the culture that ...