Now, obviously, when you take the Book of Hosea, and you set it in 1850 in the Gold Rush in the United States, you’re losing a lot of the context, like all of the context actually. There are significant changes to the story and additions to make it a novel for obvious reasons. You’re making a biblical story into a novel, there’s a lot that’s going to be lost in that process. And so, Redeeming Love is loosely, loosely, loosely based on Hosea. It doesn’t really follow the actual story of Hosea at all, but it will typically be advertised as “based on Hosea”. The main characters are Angel, who would be Gomer, the prostitute, and Michael Hosea, who represents Hosea, the prophet. The book follows Angel’s story and how Michael Hosea basically loves her to restoration by marrying her even though she was a prostitute.
I’m not going to get into any more of the actual plotline. It’s a long book. I did not read it during the height of my struggle with erotica, because I knew that it would not be healthy. There were years where I went without reading fiction at all, or even going to the movie theater because I could not handle being in front of that kind of sexual content or being surprised by sexual content. I was that sensitive to it. There were years that I went without consuming that kind of content. But then about two or three years ago, I recognized that I was mature enough and discerning enough to read through Redeeming Love. I did read through it. I was sadly very alarmed that older Christian women were recommending the book to young Christian women with no caveats and that’s important, okay, it’s important to this conversation, because I really believe that there are some people who’ve been genuinely touched and healed in some ways by this book. I don’t doubt at all that that has happened and that’s why I want to be gentle and careful in how I talk about this.
However, when we recommend material like this with no caveat or context, we are potentially setting an enormous stumbling block in front of young women who are struggling with pornography, which is what erotica is. In Redeeming Love, there is soft pornographic content. Soft pornography is basically just when we draw the curtain at a point that would be considered hard pornography, that would be much more graphic like you might see in a Harlequin novel. While there’s a lot less in Redeeming Love than then you would see in a Harlequin novel, there’s still enough content to be concerned and in the movie which is rated PG-13 for this exact kind of content, we have to be cautious and discerning. We have to consider what Scripture says about this kind of sexual content and whether it justifies the story that’s being consumed. I have a couple of passages here. The first is 1 Corinthians 6:18. Again, a letter from Paul to the Corinthian church, he was living in an extremely sexualized culture where sexualization was normal and even a part of worship.
