Andrew Bunt has just brought out a new book, Getting God’s Perspective: A Short Christian Introduction to Worldviews, Sexuality and Gender, and had the chance to ask him about it.
IP: As a member of Living Out, you clearly have a concern for teaching about issues around sexuality. But why do you think this is still such an important issue in our culture? Why do we need to keep talking about it?
AB: The main reason that motivates me is that there will always be people like me: those who want to follow Jesus and who experience same-sex attraction. Walking that path isn’t always easy, especially in a culture that thinks so different about sexuality, and so I think it’s important that we continue to seek to equip churches to handle the topic of sexuality well.
But two other things also make me think sexuality is a topic we need to keep talking about. One is that for lots of people in our culture, Chrisitan teaching on sexuality is one of the big stumbling blocks that would stop them from following Jesus. If we can’t communicate God’s perspective well and build churches where those with different experience of sexuality can flourish in following Jesus, it will impact the mission of the church.
The other is that young people today are looking for wisdom that will help them to live well and I think they’re fast realising that the sexual revolution hasn’t delivered on the utopia of wellbeing it promised. They’re looking for a better perspective on sex and relationships, and we have that better perspective. I think sexuality actually has the potential to be a way we can help young people see the goodness of following Jesus.
IP: I was fascinated to see that you begin your book what most people will think is a completely unrelated issue—that of ‘worldviews’. What do you take this approach?
AB: I have lots of conversations with people about Christian teaching on sexuality and often people have big questions and objections to that teaching. But I’ve noticed more and more that a lot of the time the issue isn’t actually about sexuality. Often the real issue is about understandings of freedom, or identity, or authority – worldview level beliefs. Part of why we struggle with Christian teaching on sexuality is that we don’t have a solidly Chrisitan worldview in place to underpin them.
As I had that realisation, I then looked back on my own story. I reflected on my teen years when I had to work out what I believed God says about sexuality and how I was going to live in response. I realised how much having Christian worldview foundations firmly in place had helped me then. I’ve become convinced that worldviews are the fundamental foundations we have to consider before we think about sexuality and this book is my attempt to help us lay those foundations.
IP: You contrast a ‘secular materialist’ worldview, with a Christian one. Is it possible to be binary about these different approaches? In reality, are we not all a mixture?
AB: We probably are, yes, but’s why it’s so important that we check our worldview. I think we find Paul pointing us in this direction in Romans 12:2. There he warns us of the risk of being conformed to the world and challenges us to instead be transformed by the renewal of our mind. We’re often a mixture of these two worldviews because it’s so easy to be shaped by the world around us (where the secular worldview is dominant) rather than be transformed so that our mind is renewed to have a worldview shaped by God’s word. Heeding Paul’s warning and challenge is a lifelong task, but one thing that helps is to be aware what we want to avoid being conformed to and what we want to be transformed into. That’s why understanding key elements of these two worldviews is so helpful and important.
IP: I was interested that, amongst other issues, you explore the questions of authority and freedom. Why do you think these have an impact on our discussions about sexuality?
AB: Freedom felt important to tackle because it’s such a prominent cultural theme around sexuality. Arguably, the Sexual Revolution was all about establishing a new vision of true sexual freedom. It’s been pretty successful in establishing that answer in the modern west, even if that supposed freedom hasn’t delivered the flourishing expected. Everyone has a vision of what it means to be truly sexually free. The question is whether that vision is true and good. I think there is a strong case to be made that western culture’s vision is not true or good, but God’s is.
Authority is one of the most important worldview foundations for our discussions about sexuality. In the end, all discussions on sexuality come back to who has the authority to tell us what is right and what is good. Everyone follows an authority when it comes to sexual ethics – whether it’s themselves, their culture, or God. But we rarely stop to consider what authority we’re following and whether it is right or good for us to follow that authority. We’re also living in a culture that tends to see external authorities as oppressive (one of the reasons people see Christian teaching on sexuality as harmful). We need to consider whether that is true.
The view of western culture is that we should be our own authorities, guided by our desires, but most of us can see that isn’t working out to well. When it comes to sexuality, we say that the need for consent is the authority that offers us protection, but consent is insufficient – we can consent to things that harm us or others and often we consent not really knowing the true long-term impacts of our decision. We need a better authority to guide us on sexuality and that authority is the word of God.
IP: I was less surprised to find you talking about ‘identity’ in relation to our understanding of sexuality. One of the great changes in recent discussion has been to collapse issues around sexual ethics into issues around identity. Why do you think this has happened, and how does a Christian worldview engage with this?
AB: The linking of identity and sexuality can be traced through key influential thinkers, especially from the 17th century onwards. There was first an inward turn – placing our desires as central to our personhood and identity – and then a sexualisation of identity – making our sexual desires central to our personhood. (Carl Trueman has done a great job of tracing that journey in some of his writings). More simply, I think it’s also partly because of the sheer power of sexual desire and sex. It’s hardly surprisingly that such powerful forces have grabbed our attention and made us believe they should be central. The result is a perspective that sees sexuality as core to identity and in turn leaves us effectively enslaved to our sexual desires: if you are your sexual desires, you need to act on those desires to be true to yourself, and that leaves you as good as enslaved, obligated to act on your desires lest you be denying who you really are.
A Christian worldview is so helpful because it enables us to step back and consider the topic of identity apart from sexuality. The centre point of the Christian worldview is the reality that there is a creator God and that gives us a radically different (and better) approach to identity: we don’t find identity in our desires; we receive identity from our creator. That foundation allows us to know who we are which allows us to then acknowledge the reality of our sexual desires – with all their force and power – and receive God’s expert guidance on how best to respond to them. The Christian worldview helps us to separate identity and sexuality such that we no longer have to be enslaved to our sexual desires.
IP: What difference does it make to shift the conversation into one based on worldview? Does this unlock some of the ‘talking past each other’ that often happens in the debate?
AB: I think it can, and I hope people will find that being equipped to think on the worldview level will do exactly that – help us get beyond the feeling that we’re ‘talking past each other’ when we engage with those who have a different view on sexuality.
The reality is, if we’re engaging with someone who has a totally different perspective on sexual ethics to us, we’re unlikely to get very far in our conversation. It’s not even that we talk past each other, often it’s that’s we’re metaphorically banging heads. But if we can spot what’s underlying those different perspectives on sexuality and talk about those topics, it can be much more productive. Maybe it’s a different vision of freedom. Let’s talk about that. What are the different visions, which works best, what are the reasons to believe one or the other? Maybe it’s a different vision of progress. How do those visions differ, where do they come from, which better aligns with reality?
My belief is that not only does going down to the worldview level potential help us get beyond some of our conversational clashes, but it can also help us show people how good the Christian worldview – and the perspective on sexuality built on it – actually is. The Christian worldview makes better sense of the world we live in and it gives us better answers to our deepest longings. If we learn to think in worldview terms, we might find that some of the conversations we most dread become some of our best evangelistic opportunities.
IP: What do you hope for from your book? Who do you hope will read it, and with what outcome?
AB: I’ve got lots of hopes for it. I hope Christians will be helped to live out Romans 12:2 – not being conformed to the world but being transformed by the renewal of their mind so they can know God’s will and what is good and can live his way – in the areas of sexuality and gender and in all of life.
I hope Christians will feel better equipped for conversations with others about sexuality and gender and that they might find there are ways of making those conversations not awkward or argumentative but fruitful and gospel-centred.
I hope any who read the book who are not yet Christians find it provokes them to think deeply about what they believe and whether the Christian perspective has something better to offer them – and ultimately whether Jesus gives us a better way of living in the world.
And I hope that people will take the worldview framework I have applied to sexuality and gender and apply it to some of the other big topics of life in the 21st century.
IP: Thank you for your time—talking about the book, but also taking the time to write it! We hope and pray that it will achieve these things too.
Andrew Bunt is Emerging Generations Director at Living Out, a charity that helps people, churches and society talk about faith and sexuality. He studied theology at Durham University and King’s College London and loves helping people to understand and live out biblical teaching. He is also the author of Finding Your Best Identity: A Short Christian Introduction to Identity, Sexuality and Gender (London: IVP, 2022).
He has also written Grove booklets on Polyamory and Consensual Non-monogamy and shares his personal story in his Pastoral booklet People not Pronouns: Reflections on Transgender Experience here.
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