'...the fact of original sin tells us that we do not really have any clear standpoint of experiential purity from which to figure the topic of sexuality out. Thus, a Christian would rarely deny innate drives and would readily admit that sexual reality is not simply something we make up. But its "constructed" character, whose forms follows the intricacies of our sinful thinking and feeling, is such that we cannot really tell what is constructed and what is not. Instead, we encounter our sexualities as an enormous knotted set of feelings, hopes, physical urges, pleasures and fears all mixed up and messed up. We can only try to make sense of these elements in what will be many different ways. But why we have this material and where it all comes from is very difficult to figure out.
The Christian, therefore, studies all of this, not to "see" the truth of sexuality clearly in the present, but, as it were, to identify threads that can be followed back - back historically, back psychologically, back to the depth of their meaning. And these must then lead us to the deepest recesses of human life and purpose before God. Studying sex, in other words, leads us to the same place that studying our deaths leads us - this primary reality of who we are coram Deo, before God, from God's hands, from God's loving if often unknown purposes, and in a world that, apart from God, is utter confusion and Babel.'
Ephraim Radner, A Time to Keep, p.44.
