Not New, Just Nonsense

No New Morality: Christian Personal Values and Sexual Morality, by Douglas Rhymes. Bobbs-Merrill, $3.50 In Alice’s wonderland of Christian “theology,” the newest fad is to defend traditional moral patterns while destroying every conceivable basis in faith and reason for observing them. Only a headlong flight from both the Bible and reason can explain a book which continues to find pre-marital sexual intercourse wrong, while stating, “Homosexual affection can be as selfless as heterosexual affection, and therefore we cannot see that it is in some way morally worse.” The theologian who has abandoned the Word is not capable of sound judgment.

With less persuasiveness and theological sophistication than Bishop John Robinson, Rhymes, too, rejects any possibility that God cares how people behave sexually with one an-other, or that, caring, He might let us know what He thinks about it. Because the Bible is full of God’s wishes on this subject, he finds it necessary to ignore it: in 146 pages on the Christian view of sex he quotes from the Bible six times. He excuses his neglect of the Old Testament on the ground that Christ did away with the Law (an often repeated falsehood: see Matthew 5:17). Because Christ, in the New, is even stricter, for practical purposes he must avoid Him as well.

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Harold O. J. Brown

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No New Morality: Christian Personal Values and Sexual Morality, by Douglas Rhymes. Bobbs-Merrill, $3.50 In Alice’s wonderland of Christian “theology,” the newest fad is to defend traditional moral patterns while destroying every conceivable basis in faith and reason for observing them. Only a headlong flight from both the Bible and reason can explain a book which continues to find pre-marital sexual intercourse wrong, while stating, “Homosexual affection can be as selfless as heterosexual affection, and therefore we cannot see that it is in some way morally worse.” The theologian who has abandoned the Word is not capable of sound judgment.

With less persuasiveness and theological sophistication than Bishop John Robinson, Rhymes, too, rejects any possibility that God cares how people behave sexually with one an-other, or that, caring, He might let us know what He thinks about it. Because the Bible is full of God’s wishes on this subject, he finds it necessary to ignore it: in 146 pages on the Christian view of sex he quotes from the Bible six times. He excuses his neglect of the Old Testament on the ground that Christ did away with the Law (an often repeated falsehood: see Matthew 5:17). Because Christ, in the New, is even stricter, for practical purposes he must avoid Him as well.