Augustine would be baffled by Joshua Butler’s sex article

Dr Beth Felker Jones believes a now removed article on The Gospel Coalition takes the biblical metaphor connecting God with marriage and turns it into a porn-inflected ode to intercourse

Earlier this week, Tony Wilson responded to social media controversy over a book excerpt by Josh Butler, posted at and now removed from The Gospel Coalition’s website. Butler asked us to see the sexual act as an “icon” of salvation and interpreted sex in terms of male “generosity” and female “hospitality.”

The Butler piece inflamed a firestorm online, and I’ve already named the deep theological problems it raises. Here, I respond to Wilson’s claims that to “cancel” Butler amounts to cancelling Augustine along with the Christian tradition, and that critiquing Butler teaches us “more about our distorted view of sex than the truth of his writing.”