INTRODUCTION.

Steve Chalke is a Baptist minister and an admirable campaigner for social justice. He founded a the Charity Oasis. A few years ago he adopted a progressive and liberal theology of sexuality. Recently he launched a video that was widely reported (see this link for the Church Times –  -in which he believes that an understanding of Graeco-Roman sexual culture requires that we abandon the teaching of marriage and sexual ethics as Christians have universally understood them. This essay is an answer to the issues he raises. 

Steve Chalke has been doing some research into the Classical world of the Greeks and the Romans, and has come up with some discoveries that have startled him. He has found a world that as he describes was “utterly saturated with sex.” Perhaps Mr Chalke may have led a sheltered life in his reading. But this description of classical culture comes as no surprise to many.Tom Holland, in his recent book on the Romans called ‘Rubicon’, documents how even Julius Caesar put in his time as a ‘rent-boy’ to some elderly lascivious ruler, King Nikomedes of Bythinia. The shame, such as there was amongst the Romans, was not so much in the homoerotic sex; It lay more in being the ‘receptive’ partner; effeminate; humiliating....