Openness Unhindered : Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert - Rosaria Butterfield

Those who enjoyed Rosaria Butterfield's story of her conversion in Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert will be delighted to see her sequel.

Rosaria, now a Presbyterian pastor's wife (homeschooling, almost inevitably) begins with a summary of her conversion but with new insights. She reminds us that she was saved more fundamentally from being a sinner than from being a lesbian; and was saved by Jesus Christ, not by becoming heterosexual. There are profound wrestlings here with the nature of sin (in 'Gay Pride' there is more sin in the 'Pride' than in the 'Gay').

She then looks at the whole conversion process and her subsequent Christian life through the eyes of experience and doctrine. Her intellectual penetration and sharp writing remind one of C.S. Lewis; her spiritual insights and her theology are thoroughly Puritan.

Butterfield makes an important distinction between 'admitting' sin and 'confessing' sin. The former is acknowledging it, which may lead to confession, but too often today, she alleges, becomes 'well I sin but I live with it' whereas confession is to hate it and turn your back on it.

She writes of repentance, 'You can't bypass repentance to get to grace...grace does not erase my need for the law'. Repentance is the posture of the Christian. Her struggle with indwelling sin is a million miles away from the "Jesus plus Nothing equals Everything" type of gracism; grace shines all the more brightly, as in the Puritans, because of the insistence on law and the necessity of obedience and repentance.

She rejects the concept of 'sexual orientation' as a construct of the late 19thC traceable to Freud which deprives people of their true identity in the image of God. She also points put how heterosexuals are easily tripped up here into feeling a kind of moral superiority. She also rejects the use of the word 'gay' as a self-identification by Christians who struggle with same sex attraction.

Butterfield's analysis of these areas is well worth reading, coming with the ring of authenticity from one who has struggled not just with 'SSA' but with a committed lesbian past. When discussing the idea of homosexuality being unnatural, she argues that Romans 1 is dealing with practice, not inner disposition. But - is that really what Paul is saying when he speaks of 'dishonourable passions' and of women 'being consumed with passion' one for another? This is not easy, but I did not feel Butterfield quite faced this issue squarely.

The last main chapter of the book is all about hospitality - and I struggled to translate her life in Durham, North Carolina to a commuter belt Hertfordshire village. But the principles bear consideration.

The acknowledgements are cheesy - two and a half pages, thanking everyone under the sun. But that is becoming fashionable in American books.

A great book though, essential reading in our day, a good counterpoise to some recent evangelical works where one detects a tendency towards soft-peddling sin in this area.