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Faithful

A Theology of Sex

ZONDERVAN

SEX AND REALITY

In Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake, she creates a horrific world, a dystopia. Lots of things have gone wrong, but sex is one area in which brokenness shows up powerfully. The main character, Jimmy, is in love with a woman named Oryx. Oryx has an unspeakable past, one of abuse and exploitation, in which she was cruelly used by child pornographers. Jimmy wants to know exactly what happened, and he keeps pressing Oryx for details.

Jimmy asks, "It wasn't real sex, was it? ... In the movies, it was only acting. Wasn't it?"

Oryx shuts him down with her answer. "But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real."

I believe this insight is exactly right: "All sex is real."

Much of what goes wrong around Christian understandings of sex has to do with our failure to connect sex to reality. We fail to see that the way we do—and do not—have sex has to do with who God really is and who we really are.

When theologians use a word like real, we mean serious business. What is most real is God, and whatever it really means to be human has to do with who God is and with God's good intentions for us.

Irenaeus, a teacher and leader in the early church, talked about reality in just this way. Humans, Irenaeus insisted, were not put here to fade away into nothing. This is because God made us and has plans for us. We have a purpose. Since we "are real," Irenaeus writes, we "must have a real existence, not passing away into things which are not, but advancing [to a new stage] among things that are." Irenaeus expects that we will continue to grow, to mature, and to become more and more—really—the human beings that God created us to be.

The idea that "sex is real" is difficult to understand in our world, a world in which a lot of people have something at stake in pretending that sex doesn't really matter.

It may help to consider an analogy. Imagine a child who is taught that something is no big deal when, in reality, that something matters deeply. We can use the example of food. Day in and day out, the child hears lines from the following script: "It doesn't matter what you eat or don't eat."

"Eating has nothing to do with your health."

"Food is just for the body, and what really matters is your psychological health. Bodies and eating have nothing to do with that."

"Food is a private matter."

"If you have a taste for something, you should eat it. Lots of it."

"Whatever you eat in the privacy of your house is your decision. It doesn't affect anyone else."

"Don't ask where your food comes from."

"Nobody gets hurt in the production of your food."

"Nothing you eat can hurt you."

"Nothing you eat will help you to grow strong."

"You might like broccoli, but that doesn't make it good for me. That's just your personal preference."

"Food should always make you happy. Pleasure is the only reason for eating."

Even though the script is detached from reality, the child internalizes it. The child believes it, and the child eats a steady diet of gummy candies and fries. The child has no way to understand the relationship between her diet and the fact that she is not thriving. The child has no way to imagine the relationship between food and reality. While you and I know that food is real, this child lives in a world of lies.

In our cultural moment, it's interesting that we're willing to talk—a lot—about how food matters, but we have no tools for connecting sex to reality. Christians have a long history of recognizing the connections between food and sex. Both food and sex are central, pressing aspects of what it means to be embodied. As embodied creatures, we can't ignore either.

The world we live in tells lies about sex that are analogous to the lies about food above. We're told that it doesn't matter what we do with our bodies. Our world treats bodies as expendable or as mere means to more important ends. If we can be convinced that sex is not "real," that sex doesn't have meaning, that our bodies don't matter, then we will be vulnerable to use and abuse.

If our bodies don't really mean anything, then we will act as though we can assign them meaning at random. We will act, or others will want us to act, as though our bodies —free of real meaning—can be used, in a given moment, for nothing but pleasure or nothing but power or nothing but selfishness. We will act as though bodies can be disregarded or discounted. We will act as though bodies can be used as commodities, bought and sold on the free market.

But if sex is real, if bodies matter, then we are accountable to something beyond ourselves, something beyond whatever is in fashion or whatever the market will bear. We are accountable to reality. To truth and goodness and beauty.

We can be set free to imagine that our bodies mean something about who God really is and about the kind of good life—rich and abundant and real—that God wants for us as his beloved children. In the Christian faith, we have resources in Scripture and in Christian teaching to help us think about what sex has to do with reality. We need to claim those resources.

It's common to hear a critique of Christian sexual ethics that goes something like this:

"Why are Christians so hung up on sex anyway? Shouldn't they care more about other problems? Why do Christians act like sexual sin is the one thing we have to take seriously?"

Such critics often go on to dismiss Christian teaching about sexual behavior. These critics claim that Christians are hung up on a bunch of rules that don't actually matter (notice how this criticism makes a claim about reality). Maybe those rules are legalistic hang-ups, the baggage of immature or uptight people who are failing to remember that salvation comes by grace and not from following a set of rules. Worse, critics suggest that those rules come from somewhere devious and twisted—maybe they are about self-righteousness, from people who like to look down on others and condemn what they are doing—maybe they come from hang-ups about the body, from "Puritanical" people who have no room for joy or pleasure in their lives.

I hope that Christian resources that help us understand how "sex is real" will also help us respond to these criticisms. Christian sexual ethics have everything to do with who God is and with what it means to be human.

The critics are right that sexual ethics is not the only area that Christians ought care about, but they are wrong that sex does not matter. Sex matters because it is real. Sex is not incidental, something that we shake off as though it doesn't really touch the core of our existence. Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, names sexual sin four times in a list of ten types of sin (1 Cor. 6:9–10). He takes sexual sin seriously because it is so intimate, so personal, and so bodily. Other sins are "outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself" (v. 18). These are not the words of a prude or of someone who has a problem with bodies. These are the words of someone who understands that our bodies are real and that what happens in the body is intimate and personal. Sex matters because embodiment goes to the very heart of what it means to be human.

Scripture teaches in many different ways that sex really matters. The way Christians do—and don't—have sex is anchored in the deepest truth about reality, and it witnesses to the reality of a God who loves and is faithful to his people. More than that, Christian sexual ethics reflect reality because they make sense of the kind of creatures God made us to be, and so those sexual ethics offer us a way to really flourish as human beings. They point to a way to be in relationship with God and with each other that bears faithful witness to the God who is love (1 John 4:8), who is the truth about reality.

Some contemporary Christians seem to have given up on sexual morality. They assume that it's unrealistic to expect Christians to look different from the world, or they dismiss tradition as outdated. Other Christians accept traditional sexual ethics—not having sex outside of marriage—as a given and assume that there is such a thing as good sexual behavior and bad sexual behavior.

In both cases Christians often have very little idea why sex might matter. Whether sexual morality is rejected or is clung to as a norm, many Christians don't have much to say about why sex matters for the Christian life. Even where we accept classic Christian teaching about sex, we still may have trouble acting on those beliefs. Most of us don't know how to explain Christian teaching on sex to people who are not Christians, people who might be put off from Christianity by its strange sexual ethics.

I hope this book addresses this by talking about sex in a way that shows how Christian sexuality is not a series of legalistic morals but is instead meant to be a witness to the God who is faithful to Israel and to us. Sex matters to God because bodies matter to God, because God created our bodies and has good plans for us as embodied people. Sex is a witness to what God does in our lives, the same God who says to Israel, "I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord" (Hos. 2:19–20).

The early church assumed that sex is real, that it matters. We see one important example of this in Acts 15. This is a record of a defining moment for the people of God. The Christian church—which had been up to that point mostly a Jewish church—was figuring out how to open itself up to people who were not Jews.

The church was feeling its way forward as it tried to understand what it means to be a people of many nations. Questions circled around obedience to the law as revealed in the Old Testament. Would new Gentile believers be bound to the full weight of the Jewish law? Specifically, would they need to be circumcised when they converted to Christianity? We can imagine this question felt very, very real to the new Gentile convert whose genitals were being discussed.

These early Christians made a crucial decision. New Christians would not be bound to the law. They would have freedom in Christ to come into the people of God without having to be circumcised, without having the mark of God's covenant with Israel on their bodies. This decision was extremely significant, and it only makes sense if Paul is right when he teaches that "in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love" (Gal. 5:6).

The church knew this, knew that "for freedom Christ has set us free" (Gal. 5:1). When we read Acts 15, we read about the very good news that is ours in Jesus Christ. God cleanses our hearts by faith (v. 9). As circumcision marks the Jews as God's people, Christians are marked by baptism, shared by all believers. We belong to God, not because of anything we have done—not because of circumcision and not because of sexual morality—but because of what Christ has done for us. This is central to the gospel, central to Christian faith. There is real goodness and truth and beauty here.

Right now, my imaginary critic—the one who thinks Christian sexual morality is nothing but legalism—might think their argument has been clinched. After all, the early church refused to bind Gentile Christians to legal obedience, so surely traditional and biblical restrictions on Christian sexual behavior should be thrown out. If we keep reading in the book of Acts, however, we find a different set of expectations.

Gentile converts will not have to be circumcised, but they are absolutely expected to live their lives in a way that witnesses to who God is and to what Christ has done. They will not have to be circumcised, but they will have their lives changed by the gospel. They will not have to be circumcised, but their bodies will be signs of what God has done.

Gentile believers are not bound by the full weight of the ceremonial law, but all believers are still expected to live according to the "essentials" (v. 28). It is significant that these essentials, as named here in Acts, are only two. The first is an anti-idolatry command; don't eat meat sacrificed to idols. The second is to "abstain" from "fornication" (v. 29).

Right here, in the middle of the gospel recognition that we are free in Christ, sexual ethics are reaffirmed and cemented as essential to the Christian life. Here, in recognizing that Christians will have a new relationship to the law, the church also recognized that sexual ethics matter.

As the apostles are in the middle of the "joy" (v. 3) of seeing lives changed by the grace of Jesus Christ, they ask God's people to avoid fornication. It seems clear that sexual ethics are not just legalism. They are, somehow, "essential." Sexual ethics are part of the way that God changes our lives, helping us to become more and more like Jesus and to be more faithful in bearing God's image in the world. Sexual ethics are essential because faithful sex testifies to the power and the character of the God who saves. Sex is very real.

CREATED GOODNESS

A friend told me a story about her grandmother. During time spent in a nursing home, her grandma was abused. When the family discovered the abuse, there was a financial settlement. My friend, naturally, found this situation upsetting, and she mentioned to her mom that she wished the whole thing had never happened. Her mom was more cavalier. She responded that she thought the situation was a "win-win."

As her mother saw it, nothing that happened to grandma's body mattered—it wouldn't be part of her life in heaven—and the family got significant settlement money from the situation. But bodies do matter. The Scriptures don't point us toward a disembodied heaven. They promise the hope of future resurrection, of "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev. 21:1), and they assure us that we matter—body and soul—to God. Bodies are real, and my friend was right to be horrified, not only by what her grandmother suffered, but also by her mother's response.

I don't think the mom in this story was trying to be cold, but she'd probably received some bad teaching about where Christianity stands on questions about the body. Christians can never think of the body as something that doesn't matter. Bodies are God's good creations, and resurrection bodies are included in God's good final plans for his everlasting kingdom. Grandma's body, in this life and in the next, is precious to God.

The Christian faith is profoundly for the body and for the joys of the bodily life. God, after all, created us—body and soul—and called creation good. Furthermore, God is redeeming us—body and soul—so that we may "bear the image of the man of heaven" (1 Cor. 15:49) and show the love of God to a world in need.

Being for the body means that what we do, in the body, matters. According to Paul, we're the people who are "always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies" (2 Cor. 4:10). The life of Jesus is supposed to be visible in our flesh. People who see us should be able to see the gospel of Jesus Christ. Given this, it shouldn't surprise us that the life of the body—including things like eating and sex—matters.

Christians have to recognize that bodies matter because of what we believe about creation and about God, who is the Creator. One of the most Christian things we can do is to affirm the goodness of creation. We know that creation is good, and we are meant to act on the truth that creation is good. This was a distinctly Christian move—a counter cultural move—in the days of the early church. This same insistence is a distinctly Christian, countercultural move in our time.

In the early days of Christianity, the threat to creation's goodness came in the form of a heresy called Gnosticism. Gnostics denied the goodness of creation. If we study Gnostic groups that were active in the early centuries of the church, we find that quite a collection of them existed. They weren't all exactly the same, but they shared certain key teachings, teachings that Christian faith recognized as false.

What key features did those Gnostic groups share? First, they were insider groups. That is, they divided the world into two groups: those in-the-know and those who didn't have their special in-group knowledge. Gnosticism was thus, by nature, elitist. The secret in-group knowledge (the gnosis that gives the Gnostics their name) wasn't for just anybody. It was only for those who were in the Gnostic fold, and that left those on the outside in a sad position, because the Gnostics believed that their salvation came through that insider knowledge.

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Excerpted from Faithful by Beth Felker Jones. Copyright © 2015 Beth Felker Jones. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
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