“Got a verse for that?”
The evangelical hermeneutic that rejects any sexual doctrine which can’t be prooftexted in as many words is a kind of modern Pharisaicalism. It demands the letter of the Law, and so denies its spirit. It is driven by our modern Gnosticism: in downplaying the importance of embodied existence, we become unable to see the larger “shape” of theology beneath the Bible’s commands, and so we reduce sexual doctrine to the explicit propositions of Scripture. But Scripture itself does not merely teach us what to think—it also teaches us how.
