This is a brave and wise book. The territory into which it leads us—in shockingly clear detail—is perhaps the most contested moral, social, and cultural issue of our times: the question of same-sex desire and practice. None of the issues is shirked here; no soft answers are on offer, no easy fudge to let us slide around the problems. David Bennett has lived for several years at the heart of the questions—or perhaps we should say that the questions have lived in his heart, like a wasps’ nest buzzing angrily inside a room that ought to be a safe place. He has felt the pain of raging and unfulfilled desire, and also the pain of desire fulfilled but strangely unsatisfied. He has felt the anger of being patronized and dismissed by unthinking Christians, as well as the anger when, having discovered for himself the reality of Jesus as a living, loving, and challenging presence, he has often then been patronized and dismissed by the very people whose cause he had earlier, and loudly, advocated.
If all this sounds as though David Bennett will come across as an angry young man, nothing could be farther from the truth. David looks back not in anger but on anger—and sees it, names it, and deals with it. He understands and sympathizes with those who see no problem in acting upon their same-sex desires or the way of life they shape around them; he disagrees with them but is able to explain why. He understands and has learned to forgive those whose practice of Christian faith has made them simply point a finger labelled “sin” at anyone who doesn’t fit their stereotypes. The real heroes of his story, though, are quite different Christians who, with no loss of integrity or biblical wisdom, continued to love him and pray for him through some dark and stormy times.
David’s account of his meeting with Jesus, and the transformation that this produced in his life, his mind, his body, his imagination, and his hopes, is alone worth double the price of the book. His conversion story, like all true conversion stories, is more complex and interesting than such a phrase might suggest. I was struck, in particular, by the way that before his meeting with Jesus, David positively hated the Bible. Since I have spent most of my life in love with the Bible and hoping to instill this love in others, it was and is good for me to be confronted with the sharp reminder that “that’s how your stuff makes some people feel.” But for those of us who engage in areas of Christian work other than frontline evangelism, his whole story is a wonderful encouragement: not that we ever supposed the gospel could no longer change lives, but that it’s always good to hear fresh stories, vividly told, of how that change can happen despite the most unpromising starts.
There are, inevitably, places where we will agree to differ. David uses the language of LGBT and a few other initials as well; having lived in the world where those on the margins found a peer group with whom they could share sorrows and fears, he does not wish to turn his back on folk for whom that self-description is something of a lifeline. I have come to regard the list of initials LGBTQI as problematic, since each refers to quite different phenomena, sets of circumstances, assumptions, and challenges, and to lump them all together can, from the outside, look like a way of saying, “We’re just going to live by whatever impulses we feel whenever we feel them.” I stress from the outside: I greatly respect David’s insider viewpoint and will, I hope, continue to learn from him.
Above all, I respect and salute David’s resolute affirmation of chastity: of sexual fidelity in heterosexual marriage and sexual abstinence outside it. C. S. Lewis once remarked that when Charles Williams was lecturing in Oxford, the undergraduates were shocked because, having long supposed that the old rules about chastity were outdated, they were confronted with an author, literary critic, and lecturer who knew his texts like the back of his hand and was able to bring them gloriously to life, and who passionately believed in chastity. Hitherto they had supposed that anyone advocating sexual abstinence must have something wrong with them; now, suddenly, they discovered that the boot might be on the other foot. David Bennett’s compassionate intelligence, his forthright tell-it-like-it-is memoir, and his rich theological understanding mean that when he advocates chastity, as he does in this book, nobody will be able to dismiss him in the way they might dismiss elderly theologians like the present writer.
Of course, if people prefer to work out their morality having checked in their brains at the door—a charge that applies equally to the unthinking Christian and to the unthinking secularist—then David Bennett’s book will be a wake-up call. This is about thinking through what sexuality is really all about and what a wise and mature Christian reading of the Bible has got to do with it. If we can put thinking itself back on the agenda for these discussions, and then use that thinking to address in fresh ways the many-sided questions that force themselves upon us, we just might get somewhere. David Bennett’s book will help at every stage of that urgently necessary process.