Books attempting to bridge the presumed cultural divide between Christianity and Sex are becoming quite common. In "What Wives Wish their Husbands Knew about Sex," the authors attempt to do, from a Biblical foundation, just that.

They are certainly to be commended on several fronts:

1) They recognize that the Bible does affirm regular, fulfilling sexual relations between a husband and his wife.

2) They attempt to derive their main assertions from Scripture itself.

3) They encourage us to reject the extremes: prudishness and sexual excess.

4) They draw the connection between love (the kind of love at which Christians should excel) and sex. This connection means that Christian husbands, are called to be great lovers (non-sexual), which allows them to be great lovers (sexual).

Unfortunately, despite these positive points, much of what is contained in this book is, I fear, ultimately unhelpful to married couples. I don't want to belabor these points so I will attempt to be brief.

1) First, it is not clear that the authors have properly understood the context of the Song of Songs and how to interpret it properly. While I commend them for their rejection of the allegorizing of this book, I think they miss the progression from engagement to marriage to consummation. Because they interpret every passage as relating directly to a married couple, they draw conclusions that do not necessarily follow from the text.

2) Most importantly, I think the book advocates a view of sexuality within marriage that actually affirms, rather than rejects, dangerous cultural views about sexuality. The authors regularly insist that Christian marriages should be filled with "mind-blowing" and "hot" sex. Throughout the book the bar is set quite high in terms of the quality of sex Christian couples should enjoy.

One of the biggest problems in the culture today, and not simply relating to sex, is the constant pursuit of bigger, better, faster, more. We lack a cultural perspective on what it means to be satisfied. We must be careful not to allow this to creep into Christian bedrooms.

One pastor I know uses the analogy of steak and burgers. Steak is wonderful - we should all appreciate a great steak. But we can't have steak every night. Sometimes we're going to get burgers and we need to be able to appreciate the burger rather than resenting it for not being steak.

Or think of giving your wife a spectacular gift for your 10th anniversary. On the 11th anniversary you also give her a gift, but it cannot possibly match the prior year's. Does the wife have the right to reject the gift because it does not meet or exceed the quality of a previous gift? Of course not. She needs to be satisfied with both gifts.

So it should be with sex in marriage. All couples should know how to give their partner steak and they should enjoy and cherish that steak. But there is a time for steak, and there is a time for burgers. If we cannot be satisfied with burger-quality sex, not always - but regularly, than we will put tremendous strain on our relationships.

I have little doubt that the authors would agree with this but the bulk of the book seems to ignore this most important point.

3) Finally, and perhaps this is a minor point: it troubles me that the authors perpetuate the "Scarlet Letter"-derived attitude which claims that the Puritans were total killjoys who had no use for sex, beauty, fun, etc. The authors set the Puritans up as the source of the extreme anti-sexual bias in some elements of the church. They have not done their research. Helpful correctives can be found here and here.

Also on this point - I think it is irresponsible of the authors (even ignoring their Puritan-confusion) to indicate that prudishness is as dangerous as sexual impurity or excess. The authors suggest that the (im)balance of sermons (more sermons warning against lust than encouraging vibrant sex-lives) is out of line with the Scriptures. While I hope Christian marriages will include enjoyable sex, I'm not aware of any Scripture passages which suggest that "The prudish shall never inherit the kingdom of heaven." Scripture is, in fact, quite "imbalanced" if you think that kind of statistic is important. ( )