Review: Porn-again Christian


I got a link to this video from the Desiring God blog and it prompted me to put up my recommendation of Mark Driscoll’s Porn-again Christian which is available as a free download here.

Sexuality is such a massive deal for us as individuals and as a culture. In Britain over the last 100 years the perceived hypocrisy of the Victorian era has been replaced with a morally bankrupt permissive culture. The witness of Christ’s church has been mixed, a problem compounded by understandably biased media attention: sex scandals make headlines in a way that marital fidelity never will.

Sexual sin, as the Bible notes, is particularly emotive and potentially destructive. Why did God create us with urges so powerful? John Piper suggests an amazing answer, “God created us in his image, male and female, with personhood and sexual passions so that when He comes to us in this world there would be these powerful words and images to describe the promises and the pleasures of our covenant relationship with Him through Christ.”

Elsewhere, Piper brings a helpful call for right perspective: “For many in our culture, especially men, the giant Jupiter among the planets of our emotional solar system is sex. When the spectacularly larger sun of Christ’s supremacy is rejected as the centre of the solar system of our lives, all the planets go out of orbit.”

Driscoll writes, as you’ll expect if you’re familiar with his work, in a manner that is unsettling in the best of ways as he declares God’s truth. Because he is so thorough you will be unlikely to activate whatever get-out clauses you have allowed yourself to construct and that is a good thing. The degree of detail is as explicit as it could get without pictures and that is, by and large, really helpful because little is left unanswered. Furthermore there isn’t a hint of the behaviour-specific legalism that can tend to creep in to so-called biblical teaching on topics like this.

Most wonderfully his solution to the issue of sexual temptation is grace. Real grace, not ‘Oh it’s OK that you keep sinning…’ but grace that is ‘the handmaid of holiness and not the apologist for sin’ as I believe Spurgeon once described it. So Driscoll considers a man’s identity in Christ and the redeeming power He gives to those who put their trust in Him: “As God’s man, you will then able to rise above your lusts, but not by works or selfwilled deprivation. Instead, God’s grace that alone saves you will also empower you to live life with Jesus and like Jesus.” That is wonderful truth and this book could be one of the means of grace God is giving you to help you become more like His Son.