Sanctified Sexuality

Valuing Sex in an Oversexed World

Sandra Glahn, C. Gary Barnes

• Publisher: Kregel Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780825476150
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Expert biblical and practical advice for handling today's most challenging sexual issues Although modern culture constantly changes its views on sexuality, God's design for sexuality remains the same.Bringing together twenty-five expert contributors in relevant fields of study, Gary Barnes and Sandra Glahn address the most important and controversial areas of sexuality that Christians face today. From a scriptural perspective and with an irenic tone, the contributors address issues such as:

• The theology of the human body
• Male and female in the Genesis creation accounts
• Abortion
• Celibacy
• Sexuality in marriage
• Contraception
• Infertility
• Cohabitation
• Divorce and remarriage
• Same-sex attraction
• Gender dysphoria

An ideal handbook for pastors, counselors, instructors, and students, Sanctified Sexuality provides solid answers and prudent advice for the many questions Christians encounter on a daily basis.

CHAPTER 1

OUR BODIES TELL GOD’S STORY

CHRISTOPHER WEST

I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure were bad in themselves. But they were wrong.

—C. S. Lewis

In the early 1900s, a “respectable” woman wore an average of twenty-five pounds of clothing when she appeared in public. The sight of an ankle could cause scandal. Over the next one hundred years, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. Today scantily clad, hyper-eroticized images of the human body have become the cultural wallpaper, and graphic, hard-core pornography has become the main reference point for the “facts of life.”

Is it any wonder in the post-sexual-revolution world that humanity’s deepest, most painful wounds often center on sexuality? And by sexuality I mean not only what we do with our genitals behind closed doors but our very sense of ourselves as male and female. We live in a world of chaotic, widespread gender confusion, a world that seems intent on erasing the essential meaning of the sexual difference from the individual and collective consciousness.

A BOLD, BIBLICAL RESPONSE TO THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

All of this has posed an enormous challenge to Christians. How have we responded? Those who began acquiescing to what might be called “the new morality” had to reinterpret the Bible in order to do so, a move that eventually led many believers and denominations to abandon the basic tenets of the Christian faith. On the other hand, Christian leaders who upheld traditional biblical faith and morality often found themselves without a convincing language to engage their own congregations, who were being increasingly influenced and formed by the ethos of the secular culture. The same held true for parents with their children. The silence was deafening. “The Bible says so” and “thou shalt not” weren’t enough to prevent people from getting carried away by the tide of so-called sexual “liberation.”

In the early 1950s, right at the time Hugh Hefner launched Playboy magazine, a young Polish priest, philosopher, and theologian named Karol Wojtyła (pronounced “voy-TEE-wa”) started quietly formulating a fresh, bold, compelling, biblical response to this modern brand of liberation. This was a man steadfast in his commitment to traditional Christian values, but also open and attentive to the challenges being raised by the modern world. As a student of contemporary philosophy himself, he understood how modern men and women thought, and he believed he could explain the biblical vision of sex in a way that would ring true in their hearts and minds. From Wojtyła’s perspective, the problem with the sexual revolution was not that it overvalued sex, but that it failed to see how astoundingly valuable it really is. He was convinced that if he could show the utter beauty and splendor of God’s plan for the body and sexuality, it would open the way to true freedom—the freedom to love as Christ loves.

Over the next twenty years, he continually refined and deepened his vision via the pulpit, the university classroom, and in countless conversations and counseling sessions with dating, engaged, and married couples. (Wojtyła’s open, honest approach with young people—no subject was off-limits if sought honestly—was very similar to that of Francis Schaeffer.) In December of 1974, now as archbishop of Krakow, he began putting this bold, biblical vision to paper. On page 1 of his handwritten manuscript, he gave it the title Theology of the Body.

This was an altogether different kind of Bible study on sex. It was not the all too common attempt to scour the Scriptures looking for proof texts on immorality. The goal was to examine key passages from Genesis to Revelation, over a thousand in all, in order to paint a “total vision” of human love in God’s plan. In essence, Wojtyła was saying to the modern world, “Okay, you wanna talk about sex? No problem. But let’s really talk about it. Let’s not stop at the surface. Let’s have the courage to enter together into what the Bible calls the ‘great mystery’ of our sexuality. If we do, we’ll discover something more grand and glorious than we have ever dared to imagine.”

This was a vision that had the power to change the world—if the world only had a chance to hear it. That chance came when, in October of 1978, this little-known Polish bishop was chosen as the first non-Italian pope in 450 years, taking the name John Paul II. Having only recently completed his theology of the body manuscript (it was originally intended as a book to be published in Poland), he decided to make it his first major teaching project as pope, delivering small portions of the text over the course of 129 weekly addresses between September of 1979 and November of 1984.

It took some time, however, for people to grasp the significance of what this in-depth Bible study had given the world. It wasn’t until 1999, for example, that his biographer George Weigel described the theology of the body to a wide readership as “a kind of theological time-bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences … perhaps in the twenty-first century.”¹ While John Paul’s vision of the body and of sexual love had barely begun to shape the way Christians engaged their faith, Weigel predicted that when it did, it would “compel a dramatic development of thinking” about virtually every major tenet of the Christian faith.²

GOD, SEX, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

What might the human body and sex have to do with the basic tenets of Christianity? There’s a deep, organic connection, in fact, between the two. As we observed above, rejection of the biblical vision of sexuality has led in practice to a rejection of the basic principles of the faith. And here’s why: if we are made in the image of God as male and female (see Gen. 1:27), and if joining in “one flesh” is a “great mystery” that refers to Christ and the church (see Eph. 5:31–32), then our understanding of the body, gender, and sexuality has a direct impact on our understanding of God, Christ, and the church.

To ask questions about the meaning of the body starts us on an exhilarating journey that, if we stay the course, leads us from the body to the mystery of sexual difference; from sexual difference to the mystery of communion in “one flesh”; from communion in “one flesh” to the mystery of Christ’s communion with the church; and from the communion of Christ and the church to the greatest mystery of all: the eternal communion found in God among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is what the tenets of the Christian faith are all about.

Hence, as we’re already seeing, the body is not only biological. Since we’re made in the image of God as male and female, the body, as we will see in some detail, is also theological. The body tells an astounding divine story. And it does so precisely through the mystery of sexual difference and the call of the two to become “one flesh.” This means when we get the body and sex wrong, we get the divine story wrong as well.

Sex is not just about sex. The way we understand and express our sexuality points to our deepest-held convictions about who we are, who God is, who Jesus is, what the church is (or should be), the meaning of love, the ordering of society, and the mystery of the universe. This means John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is much more than a biblical reflection on sex and married love. Through that, it leads us to “the rediscovery of the meaning of the whole of existence … the meaning of life.”³

Christ teaches that his highest will for our lives is to love as he loves (see John 15:12). One of John Paul’s main insights is that God inscribed this vocation to love as he loves right in our bodies by creating us male and female and calling us to become “one flesh” (see Gen. 2:24). Far from being a footnote in the Christian life, the way we understand the body and the sexual relationship “concerns the whole Bible.”⁴ It plunges us into “the perspective of the whole gospel, of the whole teaching, even more, of the whole mission of Christ.”⁵

Christ’s mission is to reconcile us to the Father and, through that, to restore the order of love in a world seriously distorted by sin. And the union of the sexes, as always, lies at the basis of the human “order of love.” Therefore, what we learn in the Theology of the Body is obviously “important with regard to marriage.” However it “is equally essential and valid for the [understanding] of humanity in general: for the fundamental problem of understanding humanity and for the self-understanding of his being in the world.”⁶

Looking for the meaning of life? Looking to understand the fundamental questions of existence? Our bodies tell the story. But we must learn how to “read” that story properly, and doing so is not easy. A great many obstacles, prejudices, taboos, and fears can derail us as we seek to enter the “great mystery” of our own embodiment as male and female. Indeed, the temptation to disincarnate our humanity and, even more, to disincarnate the Christian faith is constant and fierce. But ours is an enfleshed faith—everything hinges on the incarnation! We must be very careful never to unflesh it. It’s the enemy who wants to deny Christ’s coming in the flesh (see 1 John 4:2–3).

SPIRIT AND FLESH

When it comes to present-day Christianity, people are used to an emphasis on “spiritual” things. In turn, many Christians are unfamiliar, and sometimes rather uncomfortable, with an emphasis on the physical realm, especially the human body. But this is a false and dangerous split. Spirit has priority over matter, since God in himself is pure Spirit. Yet God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he designed physical realities to convey spiritual mysteries. “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,” as C. S. Lewis wrote. “God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not…. He likes matter. He invented it.”⁷

We should like it too. For we are not angels “trapped” in physical bodies. We are incarnate spirits; we are a marriage of body and soul, of the physical and the spiritual. Living a “spiritual life” as a Christian never means fleeing from or disparaging the physical world. Tragically, many Christians grow up thinking of the physical world (especially their own bodies and sexuality) as the main obstacle to the spiritual life, as if the physical world itself were “bad.” Much of this thinking, it seems, comes from a faulty reading of the distinction the apostle Paul makes in his letters between spirit and flesh (see Rom. 8:1–17 and Gal. 5:16–26, for example).

In Paul’s terminology, “the flesh” refers to the whole person (body and soul) cut off from God’s “in-spiration”—cut off from God’s indwelling Spirit. It refers to a person dominated by vice. And, in this sense, as Christ himself asserted, “the flesh counts for nothing” (John 6:63 NIV). But those who open themselves to life “according to the Spirit” do not reject the body; it’s this body that becomes the very dwelling place of the Spirit: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? … Therefore honor God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:19–20, NIV 1984).

We honor God with our bodies precisely by welcoming God’s Spirit into our entire body-soul personality and allowing the Spirit to guide what we do with our bodies. In this way, even our bodies “pass over” from death to life: “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you” (Rom. 8:11, NIV 1984).

CHRISTIANITY DOES NOT REJECT THE BODY

The “spirit-good/body-bad” dualism that often passes for Christianity is actually an ancient gnostic error called Manichaeism, and it couldn’t be further from a biblical perspective. In fact, it’s a direct attack on Christiani...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction—Sandra L. Glahn and C. Gary Barnes
• Chapter 1 Our Bodies Tell God’s Story—Christopher West
• Chapter 2 The “Two Adams” and Spiritual Identity—Glenn R. Kreider
• Chapter 3 Sexualities in the First-Century World: A Survey of Relevant Topics—Joseph D. Fantin
• Chapter 4 Male and Female in the Genesis Creation Accounts: A Mission, an Ideal, and a Tragic Loss—Robert B. Chisholm
• Chapter 5 Gender: Male and Female in Interpersonal Expression—Sandra L. Glahn
• Chapter 6 Ethics at the Beginning of Life: Conception and Abortion—Richard L. Voet
• Chapter 7 Adolescent Sexuality—Jessica N. McCleese and Chelsi A. Creech
• Chapter 8 Adolescent and Young Adult Sexuality—Douglas E. Rosenau
• Chapter 9 Celibacy according to Jesus and Paul—Jay E. Smith
• Chapter 10 Celibacy and the Gospel—Abraham Kuruvilla
• Chapter 11 The Marriage Bed: The Fullness of God’s Design—J. Scott Horrell
• Chapter 12 Reproduction, Contraception, and Infertility—Sandra L. Glahn
• Chapter 13 Marital Sexuality—Michael R. Sytsma
• Chapter 14 Cohabitation: Research Trends and Observations—Scott M. Stanley
• Chapter 15 Divorce and Remarriage: Evidence from the Biblical Text—W. Hall Harris
• Chapter 16 Divorce: A Research-Based Perspective—C. Gary Barnes
• Chapter 17 Forced Sexuality: Rape—Joy Pedrow Skarka
• Chapter 18 Pornography, Prostitution, and Polyamory—James K. Childerston
• Chapter 19 Sexual Orientation and Identity—Mark A. Yarhouse
• Chapter 20 Same-Sex Attraction: Washed and Waiting—Wesley Hill
• Chapter 21 Gender Dysphoria—Mark A. Yarhouse and Julia A. Sadusky
• Chapter 22 How to Make Ethical Decisions—Darrell L. Bock
• Chapter 23 Personal and Interpersonal Sexual Ethics—C. Gary Barnes
• Bibliography