[Read the introduction to this series “On Being Human: A Theological Anthropology” here and Part 1, “On Being Human: Male and Female” here.]
[WARNING: The material below addresses sex, gender, and sexuality and may be difficult or even triggering to readers who have experienced sexual and/or spiritual abuse.]
The Argument in Outline:
God created sex exclusively for marriage, which is a lifelong, exclusive, sacred bond entered into by taking public vows of fidelity and love which comprehensively unite a man and a woman.
The purposes of sex and marriage are to provide joyful companionship, to bear and raise children, and to signify the union of Christ and the Church.
Our identities are grounded in our sexed bodies, not our desires, feelings, or attractions.
Conclusion: Sexual fidelity in marriage or in celibacy leads to individual, communal (especially women and children), and societal flourishing.
Introduction
As I argued previously, a growing divide exists between Western culture and historic Christianity1 regarding what it means to be human. I tried to show that there are only two ways or modes of being human because God has made us in His image as male and female. Because we are either male or female and both bring gifts as partners in God’s mission that the other needs, men ought to embrace masculinity and women femininity. This involves embracing and directing the natural powers of our sexed bodies, developing and pursuing the virtues and characteristics especially relevant to our sexed bodies, and embracing the roles of our bodies for the good of others.
Most modern people find it unthinkable to become a Christian because of what we believe about sexuality. They find the historic Christian sexual ethic not only confounding and non-sensical but offensive and even oppressive. This article aims to outline the Christian sexual ethic and explain why it is good.
In the West, the dominant religion or ideology of secularism is what some have called expressive individualism or self-sovereignty. In this view, there is no transcendent meaning, purpose, or goal to life and so each individual person may create their own meaning, identity, purpose, and morality. There are no moral laws beyond “do no harm” and “consent.” Yet, these are both very tenuous ideas. First of all, there can’t be any universal concept of “harm” since each person defines what “well-being” means for himself. Second, consent becomes very complicated when we carefully consider social and physical power and the way our individual agency is influenced by factors that are often hidden to the agent.
Both of these problems bear on the question of sexual ethics. Most people believe that sex between two people is harmless and has nothing to do with other people as long as consent is given. Christians, however, believe our lives must be governed by the law and love of our Creator and Redeemer. Whether or not we recognize it, violating God’s designs for life and for sexuality, in particular, does bring about harm to individuals and society as a whole whether or not the agents involved recognize it. Furthermore, even if we think we’re acting freely and giving consent to distorted ways of living, our choices have a way of acting back on us to undercut our freedom. Addictions and destructive relational patterns result from sinful ways of living even if we give consent and enjoy the decisions we are making for a time.
In order to outline the Christian sexual ethic, I will begin by showing the connection between sex and marriage, then explain the basic rules of human sexuality, and end by arguing that this is all for the life of the world.
Sex and Marriage: Definition and Rule
Christians believe that all sexual activity is designed and intended by God to be enjoyed in the covenant of marriage, which is a lifelong, exclusive, sacred bond entered into by taking public vows of fidelity and love which comprehensively unite a man and a woman. Any sexual activity outside of this union distorts God’s design, harms the parties involved, and negatively impacts the wider community. But there are varying levels of distortion to God’s design. The more one departs from the design, the more heinous the deviation becomes because of the increasingly negative impact on the individuals, community, and society as a whole.
Certainly, as we read Scripture, we find variations in the practice of marriage sanctioned in God’s law to Israel (divorce and kinsman / levirate marriage) and in the practice of important figures like Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon (polygamy). Divorce and polygamy may have been overlooked and seemingly given tacit approval by God, but tolerance does not mean God approved of these practices. Divorce was permitted because God knows people will live unfaithfully, so he built protections for both parties, but especially for women, to diminish the negative effects of broken marriages. The practice of levirate (Latin for “brother-in-law”) marriage, where a man would marry and seek to conceive with his deceased brother’s wife, was intended to provide sons for the widow as a form of protection for her well being and the continuation of the dead man’s name and inheritance (Deuteronomy 25:5-10). Polygamy is only portrayed positively in Scripture in the case of levirate marriage. Otherwise, the practice is shown to bring conflict, family dysfunction, and even unfaithfulness to God in worship.
When Jesus addresses the issues of sex and marriage, he points back to God’s purposes in marriage established at creation as the pattern (Matthew 19:1-12 and Genesis 2:24), affirming the standard laid out in the 7th Commandment (Exodus 20:14) and Israel’s law more broadly (Leviticus 18-20), while also furthering the call to sexual purity by demanding we fight against lustful looks and thoughts (Matthew 5:27-30). The rest of the New Testament assumes and reinforces the sexual standards of Jesus and the Old Testament (Romans 13:13; 1 Corinthians 6:9; Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 5:3; Colossians 3:5; 1 Thessalonians 4:3; Hebrews 13:4; Revelation 2:20). Distortions of marriage like polygamy, same-sex unions, and divorce violate God’s design and law, as does sex of any kind outside of marriage, including premarital sex, pornography, any form of abusive and predatory sex, and any sexual activity with someone of the same sex, with an animal, or alone. Marriage is the boundary within which sex is to be enjoyed, and the goods of marriage are the end to which our sex is to be ordered.
Sex and Marriage: Purposes
The purposes of sex are grounded in God’s design of humanity as male and female and they mirror the purposes of marriage. Sex is designed for pleasurable companionship, procreation, and symbolic portrayal. Likewise, in a broader and more comprehensive way, marriage is designed to enable humanity to carry out God’s mission to build a holy and beautiful society. The purposes of marriage include 1) to bind men and women together in lifelong, joyful companionship, 2) to provide the context for the bearing and raising of children, and 3) to signify or symbolically display to the world the union of Christ and the Church.
Sex and marriage should not be separated, for these purposes cannot be achieved when sexual activity diverges from this pattern. First of all, sex is intended to bind a husband and wife together for lifelong, joyful companionship. The act of giving our naked, vulnerable, and whole self to another is an incredibly powerful (and pleasurable) thing to do. God designed sex to function as an emotional bonding mechanism. When people sleep together, there is an intimacy and a bond that is formed that is supposed to help them stay bonded in marriage as they (usually) raise children and grow together. When people have sex outside of marriage, especially habitually, this bonding power weakens and either binds them to multiple competing partners or stops working as an emotional bond altogether. In the first case, life becomes chaotic and painful. In the second case, our ability to form a deep bond with someone becomes more difficult. This is because sex is supposed to be an act of joyful self-giving for the joy of the other. But apart from the bond of marriage, sex cannot be an act of self-giving. It can only be a conditional transaction aimed at self-gratification or some other selfish end. Sex in marriage forms us to be self-giving people deeply connected to the wider community, while commitment-free sex forms us into increasingly selfish and isolated people.
Secondly, sex between a man and a woman is ordered toward reproduction and child-rearing. God made us in His image as male and female, which means our bodies are structurally aimed at reproduction. Men and women each bring something to the other that is lacking such that they are potentially able to create a new life together. When men and women have sex outside of marriage, or when marriage is redefined to include unions between people of the same sex or between more than two people, then sex is not properly aimed at the possibility or the proper nurturing of new life. In other words, sex outside of marriage leaves women vulnerable to raising a child without the benefits of a father. Often, it leaves women vulnerable to the temptation of aborting the child. Conversely, sex between members of the same sex cannot be ordered toward new life at all. It takes a man and a woman to have a baby. Even if a same-sex couple adopts children or squires a donor or surrogate, they are not suited to bring all that is needed to raise the child because men and women are not interchangeable. Children need a father and a mother for more than conception.2 Together they provide the nurture, guidance, and examples necessary to grow into a healthy, mature man or woman. Furthermore, as reproductive technologies advance in order to disentangle reproduction from a man and woman pair, numerous other ethical considerations arise.3
Given the number of children that need a home, it is commendable when same-sex couples provide the care and parenting these children need through adoption, but it’s wrong to forsake marriage to create a new type of family that is non-generative, lacks both a father and a mother, and depends upon the separation of children from their biological parents. The same goes for singles that adopt children needing a home. We can celebrate this generous hospitality as an act of mercy and sacrifice, but it’s a different thing entirely to forsake marriage and pursue raising children independently. In more and more cases, same-sex couples and singles intentionally forsaking marriage are not adopting children in the foster system for the sake of the children. They are finding sperm donors or surrogates in order to bring new children of their own design into the world in order to fulfill a parental instinct while at the same time rejecting God’s design. Children are begotten as a gift from God. They are not made as a product of human will.4
Finally, sex portrays the union between Christ and His church. As argued in my previous post, the male and female bodies symbolize God and God’s people, respectively. In sex, the union of man and woman points to the communion for which humanity was created to experience with God. As a husband and wife give themselves to the other in love, the union, interpenetration, and joy give a foretaste of the final end for which we were created (see Song of Solomon). So when people have sex in any manner outside of marriage, it fails to portray Christ’s fidelity to and love for the church.
All three of these purposes of sex and marriage work together in unison and must be held together. Companionship, procreation, and symbolism all serve one another, but each purpose properly sanctions sex between a husband and wife so long as none of the other purposes are intentionally obscured or hindered. This does not mean that infertility or the seasons of a woman’s menstrual cycle that make pregnancy impossible violate the ordered nature of sex between a husband and wife. In other words, sex between a husband and wife is still good even if that particular act cannot result in pregnancy because, on the whole, the ordered potential still exists in addition to the other two purposes.
When people engage in sexual activity apart from God’s design to the neglect of God’s purposes, sex damages and becomes malformative to the individuals involved, hinders the healthy creation and nurture of future generations, and obscures God’s good purposes in the world.
Sexual Identity
Personal identity is grounded in our sexed bodies, not our desires, feelings, or attractions. However, in the West today, the centering of the individual and the denial of transcendence has resulted in the exponential proliferation of supposed identities and orientations. In the past and in most cultures around the world, people grew up with clear categories that gave guidance and direction to sexual desires as people developed sexually and that normed sexual behavior throughout life. But today, we’ve entered a truly new social landscape where children grow up without guidance as to how to interpret and guide their desires. A decade ago, most sexual deviances assumed binary sexual differentiation, but now more and more people consider themselves to be non-binary or transgender and announce their attractions to a variety of types or classes of people.
Instead of receiving our identity and living into it, people today now live as if we must discover, create, curate, and express our identity, and this is especially true in regard to our sexual identity. We are no longer, it is claimed, born male or female and thus obligated to learn to direct our sexuality toward the opposite sex in marriage. We’re born to throw off anything that might limit our free expression, including the limits of social norms and even our own bodies. We must be completely free to figure out what will satisfy us. But this notion of freedom as the absence of constraints will only bring more detrimental forms of bondage as we live in ways that damage us and others and prevent us from flourishing in accordance with God’s designs.
The confusion caused by separating sexual identity from the bodies God gives us is facilitated by new categories of self-description like sexual orientation or attractionality. Not too long ago, claims were being made that homosexuality was a fixed, biological fact. Since people were allegedly born gay, it was considered akin to racism to suggest same-sex sexual activity was wrong. But now assertions that sexual orientation is a fixed, biological reality are considered ignorant and oppressive in that they reinforce the sex binary.
Christianity teaches that our desires are, in large part, a mystery to us, resulting from numerous factors like biology, experience, habit, and culture, all of which are distorted by sin. Therefore, just because we find ourselves experiencing sexual attractions that deviate from God’s design does not mean these desires constitute our fundamental identity that we must express in order for us to be fully ourselves. On the contrary, various distorted desires may come and go over the course of life, and we’re to learn to control our sexual urges and direct them rightly toward an opposite-sex spouse or remain celibate. Our “sexual identity” is grounded in the body we’re given at birth. Our body determines what sexual activity is proper for us. This constraint brings incredible freedom. It frees us from the bondage of constantly having to figure out who we are and experimenting with all sorts of sexual activities that will likely leave us and others feeling damaged, used, and broken. It also frees us, over the course of a lifetime, to enjoy the goods of marriage, which cannot be enjoyed without the limits marriage places on us.
One final point needs to be made here lest I fail to address a common assumption that needs correction. Contrary to the ideology of today, having sex is not a necessity for individuals to thrive. Unlike our desire for food and water, we do not need to satiate our sexual desires in order to flourish or to simply live. Many people live full lives without ever having sex of any kind. Some never have sex because of a lack of opportunity, and others voluntarily vow to live a life of celibacy, forsaking marriage and family for some other purpose. In the Christian vision of sexuality, both voluntary and involuntary celibacy meets God’s approval. God’s broad purpose for humanity to marry and have children is not a universal obligation for each individual. Some remain single for the sake of Christ’s kingdom, and this is a noble and important calling within the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 7). Those who do not have families of their own represent to the world the final calling of all humanity in the New Creation where people will not marry but live as Christ’s Bride, brothers and sisters in God’s family.
The Christian Vision for Sexuality and Human Flourishing
I’ve suggested throughout that God’s design for marriage and sexuality leads to flourishing while diverging from this design and from God’s law leads to hurt, social breakdown, and even death. I want to try and speak to and expand on that more directly because I know that people today need to see not only that this is the Christian vision but why this Christian vision for sexuality is good for individuals, for the larger community, and especially for women and children.
The Christian Vision is Best for Individuals
Restricting sexual activity to one’s opposite-sex spouse leads to the greatest physical, emotional, psychological, relational, and sexual health.
Physically, sex outside of marriage carries numerous health risks via sexually transmitted diseases and domestic violence. Certainly, domestic violence can and does occur in marriage as well, but with marriage, one generally has more community involvement and support because of the public vows one must take to enter into marriage.
Emotionally, sex outside of marriage binds us to others who are unwilling to commit to future love, opening us up to deep feelings of betrayal and exposure when that sexual partner moves on. Furthermore, our unwillingness to commit to said partner through marriage leads us to engage in sex in a way that hinders the full bonding effect sex is supposed to produce, which will later stall or prevent us from the full power of the emotional bond sex is intended to be.
Psychologically, sex outside of marriage leads to higher levels of anxiety and insecurity as sex becomes oriented more to performance and status rather than vulnerable self-giving.
Relationally, because of the intimacy and vulnerability of sex, sex outside of marriage severely complicates relationships with sexual partners and the surrounding community or creates ruptures with previous partners, their friends, and their new partners. This often results in the need to uproot and move to avoid them.
Sexually, there is good data to support the conclusion that sex is more enjoyable and satisfying (especially for women) in the long run if it remains contained in marriage with one’s spouse. Casual affairs cater to a man’s sexual arousal given that it takes significantly less attentiveness for a man to achieve orgasm than a woman. But differences between men and women aside, the knowledge, trust, and intimacy that develops between a husband and wife over years facilitates long-term sexual satisfaction in a deeper and more fulfilling way than serial monogamy and casual sex.
The Christian Vision Is Best for the Community
A society in which people largely conform to the Christian vision for sex will be more stable, virtuous, and just because the Christian vision best protects and facilitates the family as the most fundamental building block and formational community of society.
First, marriage establishes the family, but sex outside of marriage erodes, complicates, and undermines stable familial bonds. While sexual infidelity has always been an issue even in societies that highly valued marriage, there’s no question that the sexual revolution has drastically eroded the stability of marriage. This in turn has led to higher levels of children born without a father and a mother, to higher degrees of community fragmentation, and to higher levels of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Even with the widespread availability of birth control, sex outside of marriage increases the number of children born without the benefit of a married father and mother.5 This means that even those that eventually commit to marriage often have children with other partners, which divides the loyalties, obligations, and resources of the parents. In cases of adultery, the unfaithful spouse destroys trust not only with the offended spouse but with the community as a whole.
Second, when sex is disconnected from God’s purposes, it hinders the development of virtue because the goal of sex becomes self-gratification. Because of how powerful sex is, engaging in sex apart from the commitments and duties of marriage forms us to become more and more selfish and skeptical. A society in which people are becoming more and more selfish and distrustful cannot hold together and will become increasingly adversarial as individual interests reign supreme.
Thirdly, sex outside of marriage facilitates the sexualization of society which leads to injustice. When sex outside of marriage is viewed as acceptable behavior, more and more of life becomes sexualized, which in turn creates a higher and higher demand for sexual exploration and gratification. Sexualization makes sex a pervasive reality hanging over more and more relationships. This possibility functions as a subtle pressure and source of anxiety and confusion as people wonder if they’re being pursued for sexual liaisons. This fear is often grounded in the real danger that male sexual aggression is not being restrained. The availability of pornography shapes people to possess less and less self-control, and as demand grows, sex trafficking does too.
The Christian Vision Is Best for Women and Children
While deviating from God’s design for human sexuality is bad for everyone and society as a whole, it needs to be said that the larger burden falls on women and children because men are inherently more powerful than women and children, because women and children are inherently vulnerable relative to men, and because there’s an asymmetry to the level of involvement men and women have in the process of bearing a child. Sex outside of marriage will always have more severe consequences for women and children than for men. This is unavoidable. No rearrangement of social norms, no government programs, and no amount of social engineering can change this because the strength differential is baked into our sexed bodies.6
This is one reason why the Christian sexual ethic was so revolutionary and attractive in the Roman world where men had incredible sexual latitude, women (and boys and slaves) were used as objects of male pleasure, and infants were abandoned to the elements. Christianity called men to sexual restraint, marital fidelity, and committed fatherhood. The sexual revolution, on the other hand, is in many ways a partial return to the sexual norms of Roman paganism. In trying to create conditions in which women can have commitment- and consequence-free sex as many men have historically enjoyed, new sexual norms and technologies (like birth control and internet pornography) have eroded the social conditions that enable marriages to thrive and have created new forms of sexual slavery and infant exposure.
On Consent as the Only Remaining Sexual Rule
In contrast to the Christian vision for sexuality, the modern West calls for almost total sexual liberation, where self-gratification is the only goal and consent is the only boundary. As long as the adults involved give approval, anything goes. While this boundary may seem enlightened and the only needed limit to ensure no one is harmed, this new vision for sexuality brings more damage than at first meets the eye. As liberal feminist Louise Perry argues in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, women have not been liberated by adopting the rule of consent but have instead been subjected to a new sexual landscape characterized by rougher, more humiliating, and less satisfying sex by the pressures of hook-up culture and pornographic performance and by the danger of date-rape. She shows that consent is not as clear and simple as many suggest. This background sexual landscape places significant pressures on women to have sex and to have it in a particular way that serves men’s interests because it’s “normal.” Furthermore, consent is messy when we consider how it functions over the course of a particular liaison. A woman might consent to sex initially because of a host of hidden pressures and power dynamics. But even after this consent is given, it doesn’t clarify exactly the sort of sex she’s willing to engage in as the activity progresses, which often goes in directions with which she isn’t comfortable. For both of these reasons, many women later express regret about their encounters and feel conflicted about whether or not they were raped. In the end, she argues, elite men have “benefitted” most from the sexual revolution and women are best served by getting and staying married.
Perry’s insights touch on the underlying problem with consent: men are inherently more powerful than women (physically and often socially), and this power differential complicates consent in almost every case. The best way to offset this differential and for women to have full agency when it comes to deciding their sexual partner is to have a public process whereby a woman agrees to the sexual arrangement and promises are made before a community of people. Unsurprisingly, marriage provides such a process.
Against Homosexual Sexual Activity
Much of what has been said provides the context for why homosexual sex falls outside the Christian vision for sexuality, but given the widespread acceptance of the practice and of the LGBTQ+ movement as a whole, it deserves special attention.
While progressive, revisionist Christians have sought to justify homosexual practice, the Christian tradition is uniform in its reading of Scripture on this question. Those that unrepentantly engage in same-sex liaisons, whether joined in “union” by the state or not, will not inherit the kingdom of God and cannot claim to be Christians (Genesis 19:5; Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 1 Timothy 1:10). This teaching that forbids homosexual practice is not merely based on a selection of proof texts as bare laws, which could be explained away if one ignores the sweep of the Biblical story. As we have seen, the Christian vision for sexuality is positively grounded in the nature of humanity as male and female and the purposes for which sex and marriage were designed.
And it’s when we consider the purposes of sex and marriage that we can understand best why homosexual sex is problematic, for none of these purposes can be properly accomplished in homosexual sex.
First, while marriage forms joyful companionship, homosexual sex does not and cannot form the sort of bond sex is intended to form. Even when two people of the same sex commit to one another for a lifetime, this union is not a marriage. Sexual union must be a union of opposites to be healthy for the individuals involved. It is through the total and naked encounter with the “other” that we often come to more fully understand ourselves (cf. Genesis 2:20-23). Homosexual sex is a rejection of our need for the other and therefore detrimental to our maturation and flourishing through joyful companionship. This isn’t a critique of committed, celibate friendship but of faux marriages. Certainly, lifelong friends committed to helping one another and possibly living together do experience companionship. These sorts of friendships may be what some are called to for various reasons. They are not inherently problematic in so far as the friendship does not seek to imitate marriage. But same-sex unions that imitate marriage damage both parties involved by ignoring that marital companionship depends upon the union of different sexes.
Secondly, while marriage is ordered toward procreation and child-rearing, homosexual sex cannot produce offspring. Our bodies simply don’t reproduce that way, leaving same-sex couples to use other people (surrogacy and/or sperm donors) or to adopt in order to become a hospitable community. Surrogacy and sperm donation complicate the bonds between parents and children, and surrogacy raises all sorts of ethical issues I won’t go into here. Adoption, some may argue, is a noble route for same-sex couples to pursue parenthood, but as I said above, while it is noble to provide homes to children in need, they are not able to provide both a father and a mother.
Lastly, while marriage signifies the union of Christ and His Church, homosexual sex cannot function symbolically in this way because it is not a union of the two different body types designed to do so. This disorder may not trouble modern people much, but this inability contributes to the modern problem of reducing sex to mere appetite. Sex should point us, individually and societally, to our transcendent purpose to experience communion with God. When societies lose sight of this, a host of social problems, ranging from despair to violence, follows.
Other reasons could be offered, but these constitute the central problems with same-sex sexuality and unions.
Conclusion
Sex is a wonderfully good gift of God, and because it is so good, it carries tremendous power and must be enjoyed within God’s good limits if it is to be life-giving rather than destructive. So the Christian vision of sexuality shouldn’t be characterized as prudish or bigoted. On the contrary, Christians believe that, like all of God’s gifts, sex is meant to be enjoyed for the life of the world, and for this to happen, we must reserve sex for marriage.
No doubt, many reading this have likely deviated from this pattern, experienced sexual addictions, been sexually abused, and/or had extremely painful liaisons. The effects of this can be long-lasting, but the God who created and designed us is also able to heal and restore us to wholeness. Jesus Christ, the faithful groom of God’s people, went to the cross willingly where he was humiliated and violated for the sake of his unfaithful, adulterous people. By his blood, we are cleansed of our filth, healed of our wounds, and dressed in Christ’s righteousness. We are deeply loved, and one day we will experience the communion for which we were made and which is anticipated by marital sex.
Jump to…
Introduction to On Being Human: A Theological Anthropology
Part 3 On Being Human: Ordination
I use this term to distinguish those that follow the doctrine and practice of the Church throughout history from modern Christians that have, to varying degrees, adapted Christianity to a Western, individualistic, egalitarian, rationalistic, secularism. Hereafter, I will simply use the term Christian or Christianity rather than adding “historic.”
Recently, while reading about adoption, I learned that even when a child is immediately separated from his or her mother at birth, the child experiences trauma. This never occurred to me because I hadn’t considered the way that a baby bonds with the mother in the womb! Children hear the mother’s voice and heartbeat for months, and so even if separated immediately after being born, the child somehow recognizes they are not attached to the first person they’ve ever known, and this has lifelong repercussions. This biological reality speaks to the importance of motherhood not only in conception but in the healthy development of persons as well.
i.e. surrogacy, synthetic humans, cloning, more than two humans contributing to DNA, legal questions about parental rights, etc. More on this below.
O’Donavan, Oliver. Begotten or Made?: A Discussion on Artificial Insemination. Landrum: Davenant Press, 1984.
It also has led to much higher numbers of unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
See Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington