book described the relationship between Christ and the church. I guess that’s one way to avoid the sexual intimacy about which Solomon wrote.”40
She goes on to say, “We Christians seem to be comfortable with body-related and even sexually related metaphors . . . We’re for body talk as long as it’s symbolic.”41
Father Ryan wrote:
Many think that sexuality will go away or at least become quieter as we grow spiritually. But the contrary is true . . . The sexual dimension of our beings and relationships can lead us into a sense of the holy at levels deeper than conscious understanding. Oftentimes people seem to be praying to have their sexuality removed so they won’t have to struggle with it anymore. That is a denial of a powerful, creative energy that connects us to one another. We should be struggling with it, like Jacob with the angel, for it is a messenger from God.42
The Body of Christ
It is certainly fascinating to discover how the intracellular process of Homologous recombination reveals God’s mercy, or how the bacterial flagellum reveals His ingenuity; but the biological function of sexual intercourse reveals the Creator’s great love for us.
Christopher West explains that God created sexual desire to give his creation the power to love each other, as he has loved us:43
[Christ’s commandment is that we] “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12). How did Christ love us? Recall His words at the Last Supper: “This is my body which is given for you” (Lk 22:19). Love is supremely spiritual, but as Christ demonstrates, love is expressed and realized in the body.44
West illustrates this concept with a story:
I never met my father-in-law; he died before my wife and I met. But I admire him tremendously because of the following story. At Mass the day after his wedding, having just consummated his marriage the night before, he was in tears after receiving the Eucharist. When his new bride inquired he said, “For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of Christ’s words, ‘This is my body given for you.’”45
Consider the words of the Apostle Paul:
So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.46
Our Creator gave us intercourse so that we could more fully understand what it meant when the body of God saved the soul of man. Christ sacrificially gave up his body, even to the point of crucifixion, for his church. A man and woman who sacrificially give up their bodies for one another actually re-create, somehow, Christ’s death on the cross. If the word somehow seems too vague, consider that even to the Apostle Paul this phenomenon was a “great mystery.”
In this respect theology is actually inscribed on our bodies.47 Sex, therefore, not only teaches us how to love, but shows us even more about Christ and the Scriptures that point to him. Sex is exegesis.
But not all sex is like this.
A Red Light in the Bedroom
The Red Light District is an urban area in Amsterdam with a high concentration of legalized prostitution, sex shops, strip clubs, and adult theaters. The term originates from the red lights that were historically used to signify brothels. Many would consider it one of the most sexually “liberated” places in the entire world. But Rob Bell, in his book Sex God, takes a different position on the district:
The Red Light District in Amsterdam is so sexually repressed . . . What is so striking is how unsexual that whole section of the city is. There are lots of people “having sex” night and day, but that’s all it is. There’s no connection. That’s, actually, the only way it works. They agree to a certain fee for certain acts performed, she performs them, he pays her, and then they part ways. The only way they would ever see each other again is on the slim probability that he would return and they would repeat this transaction. There’s no connection whatsoever.48
Rob is making the point that a spiritual connection is required for intercourse to be “sexual.” When the people involved do not love each other, they are not “making love,” they are making lust; and lust does not teach us anything about God.
Prostitution is an extreme example of sex that takes place outside of God’s design, but sometimes the only thing that distinguishes the kind of sex they have in Amsterdam from that which takes place in a marriage, is the glowing red sign outside the door.
According to Christopher West:
. . . it’s significant that Christ refers to looking lustfully at “a woman” in the generic sense. He doesn’t stress that it’s someone other than a spouse. As John Paul observes, a man commits “adultery in the heart” not by looking lustfully at a woman he isn’t married to, “but precisely because he looks at a woman in this way. Even if he looked in this way at his wife, he could likewise commit adultery ‘in his heart’” (Oct. 8, 1980). In other words, marriage does not justify lust . . . The sexual embrace is meant to image and express divine love. Anything less is a counterfeit that not only fails to satisfy, but wounds us terribly.49
A friend of mine recently studied Paradise Lost in his college literature class. In this seventeenth-century poem, John Milton portrays sex as wholesome before the fall, and scandalous after. One of my friend’s classmates, who also happens to be an evangelical Christian, raised his hand and asserted, “I don’t get it, they were married before the fall and after the fall; why was their sex wrong after the fall? They were married so they’re good, right?”
Wrong.
I believe Milton’s fictional poem accurately conveys the shift that must have occurred in the way Adam and Eve esteemed their bodies. Before the fall they didn’t have the capacity to objectify one another; afterwards they did. It was in this manner that their “eyes were opened.”
I don’t really believe that a husband who lusts after his wife is in the same moral position as one who patronizes a brothel. I am just trying to illustrate that regardless of the context, love that is not sacrificial, that does not put the needs of the other person first, but instead seeks to use the other’s body for its own pleasure, is not love.
This kind of sex fails to recognize the profound spirituality of the sexual bond between humans, the unique phenomenon that even the Apostle Paul called a “great mystery.” This kind of sex fails to create any kind of distinction between humans and animals, for whom sex is merely a biological process.
Born This Way
“Food for the stomach and the stomach for food” is a little proverb the ancient Greeks used to rationalize their lack of sensual control. The phrase reduced the body to the sum of its physical cravings. When you’re hungry, “Food [is] for the stomach,” just like rest is for when you’re tired, and sex is for when you’re lonely.
The phrase could be compared to more recent proverbs used to justify sexual immorality such as “if it feels good do it,” or the title of Lady Gaga’s 2011 album Born This Way. The problem with all these proverbs is that they reduce the human body to nothing more than a biological machine, void of any moral connotations. Rob Bell wrote:
This past year my family and I stayed at a wildlife lodge in Africa. We would wake up early
