Sex in the Service of God

What Is the Point of Sex? God-Centered Answers and Human-Centered Answers

If human sexuality is a part of the Created Order, then we may profitably ask—and expect answers to—the question of purpose. It is a matter of near-universal human experience that in adulthood we experience all sorts of sexual drives and desires, often overwhelmingly strong. This is why sex is so fascinating, and why getting the word “sex” on the cover of a magazine may be expected to increase its sales. But why do we have these drives? Why this mysterious chemistry of desire and delight, or for that matter of aversion and disappointment? Why did God create humankind as sexual rather than asexual beings? Presumably he could have made us like an amoeba which, so I am told, when it “wants” to multiply simply divides! And why are these desires so unruly, so ragged and apparently random, overwhelming us one moment and leaving us cold the next (hence the mythology of Cupid and his arrows)? How can we make sense of it all, and can the Christian worldview help?

It should be clear by now that when we ask, “What is the point of sex?” we are not asking a particular individual or couple why they desire or engage in sexual intimacy. There will be as many answers to that kind of question as there are couples (or, to be more accurate, twice as many). Nor is it to ask of a particular culture how or why it “constructs” marriage or other sexual and family relationships. It is to ask the Creator for what purpose he chose to make humankind “male and female” (Genesis 1:27). To ask this question Christianly is to expect an answer from the Bible rather than from “nature” (how things are). The reason for this is that how things are, as we now experience and observe them, is a distorted and spoiled version of how things were in creation. Between the creation and now there lies the great disruption of human disobedience and consequent alienation from God (Genesis 3). This is why when Jesus was asked a question about marriage and divorce and his questioners referred him to the law of Moses, he turned them from that law (given because of human hardness of heart) back to how it was “in the beginning” before hearts were hard (Mark 10:2–9).

To ask this question Christianly also radically de-centers human beings from the answer. We no longer expect an answer in terms of what promotes merely my fulfillment or my pleasure. Most of the debates are conducted in terms of “what I want to do” or “what we want to do” and “Why shouldn’t we do it if it doesn’t harm anybody else in the privacy of the bedroom?” The debates are about how much individual “freedoms” (i.e., autonomy) can be expanded without encroaching on the “freedoms” of others.²³ How much can I do before I come up against tiresome social restraints, and how can we structure a “free” and “tolerant” society that will enable me to do as much as I possibly can and desire while at the same time allowing you to do what you want?

Even if our happiness is likely to be increased by keeping sex within marriage, this is the wrong question to ask. A Christian apologetic for marriage is settling for second best if it says to people, “Join us and live our way because you’ll probably be happier that way (and have better sex into the bargain).” They may or may not be happier in the shallow sense of having better sex. They may have no sex at all: Jesus didn’t. Instead, what Christians say to people is, “Learn that the glory and honor of God is far more important than your personal satisfaction and the fulfilment of your longings and desires. And learn to center your life on his glory and purposes so that nothing so fills your heart with joy as seeing his purposes fulfilled. Then you will have the deepest personal satisfaction and joy in the world, as you rejoice in the glory of God.”²⁴ This is the most radical de-centering of human beings imaginable. But we must do this if we are to make sense of sex.

What Is the Point of Sex? Three Kinds of Traditional Answers

When people through history have asked the question, “Why are human beings male and female, and why does sex exist?” they have, very broadly, given three kinds of answer.

Procreation

First, they have said that the purpose of sex is to have children. This is, of course, the obvious biological answer—or it has been obvious through most of human history. At one level this does nothing to distinguish human sexual relations from animal (or plant) sexual relations. And it doesn’t explain why God should have chosen to make us sexual beings rather than beings who procreate asexually. Nevertheless it is supported in Scripture,²⁵ though we shall see that it has a more than purely biological purpose in Christian theology.

Relationship

Second, sex is for the purpose of deepening relationship, a vehicle for interpersonal intimacy. The purpose of sex may be seen, it is suggested, in its benefits to the couple. These benefits may include shared pleasure, mutual comfort and companionship, and the psychological benefits of mutual affirmation and unconditional acceptance. This kind of relationship, at its best, can meet deep felt needs. Some have gone further, perhaps taking their cue from Genesis 2:18 (“It is not good for the man to be alone”) and suggested that sex is a sign that human beings are social creatures in need of companionship, friendship, and close relationships. The relational nature of humankind is focused in some way on the man-woman encounter. Sex has a symbolic meaning signifying human existence as “being in fellow-humanity.”²⁶ Some have gone much further than this and have seen in sexual intercourse a vehicle for access to the divine. It is, they say, a deeply religious experience, a sensuality that “is God’s invitation to reunion” of soul and body, and “in this reunion God is experienced, whether there is consciousness of the divine name or not.”²⁷ This is much the same as the old sex and nature religions of ancient Canaan. Although the Bible abhors sex-mysticism of this kind and any incorporation of eros into the divine nature, it does speak of the relationship of husband and wife,
or bridegroom and bride, as a significant image of the relationship of God with his people and Christ with his church (Ephesians 5:22–33).²⁸

Public Order

The third kind of answer is qualitatively different from the first two. Every stable society has had to say that sex needs to be controlled and contained in some way, and has recognized that this powerful drive in human beings can do great damage if it is allowed to be expressed with no restraint. Every society has some taboos, some regulatory mechanisms, some forms of sexual behavior that are allowed and others that are forbidden. These taboos vary (as social scientists and historians show us), but they always exist in some form or another. So in one form or another, people have said that sex exists in order to be expressed in some ways but not in others. There are safe and healthy contexts for sexual intimacy, and there are dangerous and chaotic contexts. It is a mistake to think that the emancipation of sex in western society since the 1960s has removed the existence of restraint; pedophilia and rape, for example, are still taboo. What has happened is that the boundaries of restraint have changed.

Christianity echoes this universal recognition that sex needs boundaries, but claims specifically that the only safe and healthy context for the expression of sexual intimacy is the marriage of a man and a woman. Most famously in the Bible, Paul counsels the men and women in Corinth to pair off and marry because they are surrounded by so much sexual chaos (1 Corinthians 7:2). The wisdom of Proverbs warns the roving eye of the young man not to stray to another man’s wife, not simply because it is wrong but because it leads to violent and destructive consequences (e.g., Proverbs 6:20–35).

So these three answer (procreation, relationship, public order) are echoed and made specific and precise in Christian teaching.²⁹ But the question we must ask is how they fit together. Somehow it feels a bit random and disconnected, to say that God created humankind male and female to have children, to enjoy relationship, and to guard the boundaries of marriage. None of these go to the heart and root of the matter.