Theologian Says God Broadcasts Erotic Dreams To ‘terrify’ People

MY daily dips into the murky waters of Christian “thinking” produces feelings of fury, amusement, astonishment and, today, utter befuddlement, thanks to a Christian Post report about erotic dreams and role playing.

Under the headline “John Piper denounces bedroom role-playing: ‘Fantasized sin is sin’” it quotes the “noted theologian and Bible teacher”, above, as saying:

God really does use dreams to terrify us with warnings in order to humble our pride and keep us back from sin. But if that’s true, one way to look at sexually illicit dreams – dreams when you’re doing illicit things in the dream – is that God is terrifying us in our dreams of the horror of this prospect in real life, so that we won’t do it.

If you can make sense of that you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

We all know that sex in bedrooms (or in cars, behind hedges or on a trampoline) are a constant source of concern to those chained to the Abrahamic faiths, so much so that one cannot help thinking that they are obsessed to the point of madness about the sexual proclivities of humans.

Piper goes one step further by agonising over people’s sexual fantasies when he weighed in on the subject of sexual role-playing in an episode of the podcast “Ask Pastor John” posted to the website Desiring God on Monday.

Responding to questions about role-playing, Piper, an author and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota, said:

Fantasized sin is sin, no matter how many people agree on it. Playacted sin is sin. Jesus’s standard of holiness is not merely a standard of bodily deeds, but also of mental delights.

If you pursue a sexual act or an imagined sexual situation because it is more stimulating, scintillating, pleasurable, because it is forbidden, then you are living out the way of the fool, and you are embodying the principle of bondage.

Piper went on to warn that:

If a sexual desire has become so prominent in the way you pursue satisfaction in life that you must push the limits of sexual conventions in order to be a joyful and contented person, your God and your purpose for living have become too small.

In other words, we need a big, beautiful, glorious, transcendent, majestic vision of God and his purpose for our lives if sex is to stay in its pleasurable, small place. Rather, you will have it by devoting 99 percent of your effort to love your wife well outside the bedroom, so that she finds you somebody she really desires.

Piper previously explained that “sexual attraction doesn’t belong to the essence of marriage” and sexual pleasure “is not essential to marriage.”

The essence of marriage is the making and keeping of a covenant between a man and a woman to be husband and wife to each other as long as they both shall live … there is nothing in the Bible that mandates any particular degree of physical pleasure in that relationship.

Please don’t tell Piper about the two gorillas that were recently spotted in a Bronx zoo indulging in oral sex. His head will explode