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 each morning and climb into a Land Rover with our guide, who drove us all over the “bushveldt” as the Africans call it, looking at animals in their native habitats . . . When you see biological need up close, so raw and so primal, you can’t help but notice how strong it is. These animals are going to mate because it’s in their DNA, their blood, and their environment. They aren’t lying out there in that field thinking, I just really want to know that you love me for more than my body. They aren’t discussing how to make a difference in the world. One isn’t saying to the other, “I just don’t feel you’re as committed to this relationship as I am.” Other than basic biological functions, there’s nothing else going on.50
Animals are born that way, humans are not. Yet Gaga’s album contains lyrics like, “It doesn’t matter if you love him . . . Just put your paws up ‘cause you were born this way, baby.”51
Lady Gaga is a gifted artist, and has since converted to Roman Catholicism. Nonetheless, these lyrics seem to deny that we have a spiritual dimension to us that the animals don’t have. She seems to be suggesting that for humans, like animals, sex has no higher plane, no greater cause, no transcendent purpose.
The Apostle Paul, almost as though he saw Gaga coming, addresses this worldview:
Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?52
I used to think Paul called our bodies’ members of Christ’s only to demonstrate how significant they are, or to make us feel guiltier when we use them to sin. Yet the more I learn about the connection between physiology and spirituality, the more convinced I am that Paul’s admonition is to be taken literally.
The Substance of the Gospel
Traditional Christianity tends to view the body of Christ as a merely social body, and biblical references to Christians as Christ’s body are considered metaphoric. Yet Paul was much more precise in his explanation of this concept, referring explicitly to the physicality of our representation of Christ: “For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.”53
When Christ ascended into the heavenly realm,54 the same Spirit that had been governing his actions on the earth entered all believers.55 This happened so that our bodies could replace his.
Father Ron Rolheiser wrote:
The incarnation began with Jesus and it has never stopped . . . God still has skin, human skin, and physically walks on this earth just as Jesus did. In a certain manner of speaking, it is true to say that, at the ascension, the physical body of Jesus left this earth, but the body of Christ did not. God’s incarnational presence among us continues as before.56
St. Teresa of Ávila, who championed a contemplative life through mental prayer, so aptly wrote, “Christ has no body now but yours.”57 Perhaps this is why Paul likened physical bodies to “tablets of flesh”58 on which the gospel is written, or “earthen vessels”59 by which God’s power is made manifest. Our bodies