Post: Readers Respond

As a son of the Covenant, graduate of North Park University, former student at North Park Seminary and ordained United Church of Christ minister for 52 years, I appreciated Stephen Pitts’ article [Spring/Summer 2021]. I’m glad to see that there are now a number of pastors as well as church members in evangelical churches who are re-thinking this issue [human sexuality]. This “hermeneutic of prohibition” has been the fall back for far too long in not only this issue, but many others too…. The even larger question is that of sex itself. St. Augustine was a great saint of the church, but in this area he missed the ball. By restricting sex to the purpose of procreation we lost a whole dimension of human life and made it into a chore. While I applaud Pitts’ openness to same-sex marriage, are we once more seeing sex only through the narrow lens of a “relationship?” I applaud committed relationships based on mutual love, but wonder if, perhaps, we’re not going down the same “no sex before marriage” path which other generations were burdened with. Just asking!

John Cedarleaf, Fairport, New York