Sex As a Substitute for God
One of the paradoxes of contemporary attitudes to sex is that just when we expect more than ever of a sexual relationship, those relationships are becoming more fragile than ever. One historian of marriage writes, “While faced with the spectacle of broken marriages, we have come (by a strange paradox which however goes very deep into the roots of our subject) to expect far more from a happy marriage.”40 Another observes,
It is an ironic thought that just at the moment when some thinkers are heralding the advent of the perfect marriage based on full satisfaction of the sexual, emotional and creative needs of both husband and wife, the proportion of marital breakdowns … is rising rapidly.41
There is a reason for this, which the Bible calls idolatry. To worship an idol is to worship any “god” of our own choosing, our own shaping, our own creation, something created rather than the Creator. When a couple’s relationship is considered an end in itself, it becomes an idol. The Bible says that idols are empty nothings, devoid of any real substance, and that their worshippers become like them (e.g., Psalm 135:15–19; cf. 1 Corinthians 8:4). To make anything or anyone other than the Creator God the object and goal of a human project is to worship an idol and to place oneself on the path towards ever-increasing superficiality and vacuity.
If we expect too much of sex, we make it an idol. In particular, our culture often turns the sexual relationship into an introspective religion of coupledom in which the ideal is the couple gazing with a soft-focus into each another’s eyes, each saying to the other, “Darling, you are everything to me.” If he or she is everything to me, then I am bound to be disappointed. So there is an instability inherent in any attitude towards sex that expects too much of it.
Germaine Greer prophetically scorns the pathological addiction of what she calls homo occidentalis to the “religion” of orgasmic sex. Of the spread of this culture throughout the world she writes,
Young grinning couples grace hoardings among the intricate polycellular structures of villages full of families and their message is intensely seductive to the young and restless. The lineaments of gratified desire they see there will be theirs if they abandon the land, abandon the old, earn their own money and have fun. Having fun means having recreational sex: recreational sex means no fear of pregnancy, a wife who is always available and who is content with orgasms in place of land, family, and children—orgasms and consumer durables.42
Social mobility has exacerbated this problem, isolating couples from wider networks of family belonging. Paradoxically, sexual relationships become destructively intense. In their essay Confluent Love and the Cult of the Dyad, Mellor and Shilling speak of “patterns of courtship where the couples are structurally isolated, becoming intensely focused on each other.”43 The effect of social mobility on relational depth has been perceptively observed by Rodney Clapp in his book Families at the Crossroads. Contrasting the American small town with the suburb, Clapp comments, “If the image of small-town life is a sturdy, intricately rooted tree, the image of suburban life is the hydroponic plant that floats on the water’s surface and easily adapts when moved to another pond or tank.”44
This has an impact both on the perception and the practice of sexual relationships. The couple thinks of themselves as a unit in a manner that differs from before. In the older paradigm, the couple is a social unit intimately tied by links of wider family, neighborhood, and history to others. Now they are a mobile unit that moves from shallow suburban “community” to another shallow suburban “community.” In his influential book The Transformation of Intimacy, Anthony Giddens has coined the phrase “confluent love” for the inherently transient way in which “lives can run parallel only for a time before they diverge again as the individuals concerned pursue new life-courses and seek to fulfill new needs.”45
The problem is heightened because of the unrealistic expectations thus loaded onto the man-woman relationship. Not only do I easily slip into seeking my own self-actualization, I also look primarily to my sexual partner to promote and be the major instrument to provide or at least catalyze this result. The couple working at the project of coupledom for its own sake faces the problem that introspection is stifling and self-destructive. “Even the smallest cottage of the happiest of lovers cannot be habitable unless it has at least a door and a few windows opening outwards.”46 Anger and frustration grow in the airless atmosphere of a relationship that is an end in itself. Paradoxically, the outward-looking focus of living as a useful social unit in a wider society to serve God by serving others also provides precisely the safety valve we need.
It is the problem of what each expects that makes an introspective religion of coupledom so destructive. “The leech has two daughters. ‘Give! give!’ they cry” (Proverbs 30:15). Couple-centered marriage dissolves into self-centered marriage, and self-centered marriage is like a leech. Or to put it another way, it is like a pair of parasites trying to feed off one another. Scott Peck in his best-selling book The Road Less Traveled suggests that we can shape other people into host organisms on which we are parasites:
People say, “I do not want to live, I cannot live without my husband (wife, girlfriend, boyfriend), I love him (or her) so much.” And when I respond, as I frequently do, “You are mistaken; you do not love your husband (wife, girlfriend, boyfriend).” “What do you mean?” is the angry question. “I just told you I can’t live without him (or her).” I try to explain. “What you describe is parasitism, not love.”47
While loving companionship is a wonderful blessing, marriage that is introspectively “companionate” is dangerous. For in such marriage, “each becomes not only a lover, but companion, friend, and confidant with whom most or all leisure time is spent,” and such a pressure of relational expectation creates a marriage that “is in itself unstable, and … contains the roots of its own destruction.”48 In contemporary western marriage,
the marriage partner has been culturally defined as the most significant other in adult life. … This has given to marriage an altogether new weight …which … has created an emotional burden of its own: There are very high expectations, and tensions and dissatisfactions are likely in consequence.49
Therapist Susie Orbach, writing about the weight of expectation loaded onto marriage and family, comments, “The image of the family unit is the gossamer over which we stretch our needs for attachment, for intimacy and autonomy.”50 Vigen Guroian writes that Americans overload “the nuclear family with too great a responsibility for providing persons with a sense of identity and significance in life …. Under this moral weight marriage cracks, and the family is incinerated from within by the intense psychological demands placed upon it.”51 Guroian goes on to say that families need a transcendent purpose for “coming together, remaining together, and raising children.”52 This transcendent purpose we find in Genesis 1 and 2 in the task the Creator has given to humankind.
The word “transcendent” is the key. The reason for sex is not sex; the reason for sex is a goal beyond the relationship itself, for all its intense delight. Theologically, this points to the Bible’s affirmation that sex is a created good, rather than an intrinsic part of deity. The nature religions of Canaan affirmed that sexuality is intrinsic to the emphatically male gods and provocatively female goddesses of their pantheons. By contrast, the Bible affirms that sex and marriage is “a secular reality”53 (i.e., a part of the Created Order) which, “though it comes from God, is not a way to God.”54 In every generation there are those who lose sight of this and begin to speak of sex as savior. Walter Schubart wrote,
The essence of redeeming love is a breaking out of one’s solitariness, a return to the divine whole … . The beloved embodies for the lover this unity or offers himself as an instrument to mediate it. When two lovers come together, at one point in the cosmos the wound of individuation is healed … . The whole extra-personal world has gathered shape and can now be embraced in the person of the beloved … . As the distant roar of the ocean in the sea shell, so the whole of nature is felt in the breath of the beloved. This echo whispers: Thou shalt be released from thy solitariness. Thou shalt go out and meet thy Thou, who will help thee to God … . In the end sexual life drives man into the arms of God and effaces the dividing line between I and Thou, I and the world, the world and the Godhead. Genuine sexual love is a testimonium Spiritus sancti. It makes possible the interpenetration of life by heavenly powers.55
This is romantic nonsense. Tim Stafford comments, “If in the past sex was unrealistically regarded as demonic, it is now viewed as messianic. We study sex as savior: it will tell us our true nature and save us from meaninglessness.”56
In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis recognizes that Eros is at its most dangerous (and demonic or idolatrous) when it is at its most powerful and therefore most near (in resemblance) to God. Just as we may be only a few short yards from home on the map, and yet be at the bottom of a huge cliff with home at the top, so Eros may (through sex-mysticism) bring us apparently close to God while leaving us far away in reality. So Lewis recognizes that there is something God-like in Eros, the total prodigal supra-rational giving of self, not counting the cost. This total commitment “is a paradigm or example, built into our natures, of the love we ought to exercise towards God and man.”57 Eros has an inbuilt tendency to become a religion of love in which it is not usually the lovers who worship one another (that, as Lewis wryly observes, would generally be too ridiculous), but that they worship the concept of Eros itself. Whenever lovers are in love, they make vows of eternal love. And yet they fail to recognize the folly that they are making the same vows they made last year to a different lover. Always the delusion is that “this time it’s the real thing.” In a sense, Eros is right to promise eternal fidelity. Eros is an image or foretaste of the eternal fidelity of the Bridegroom in his relations with the bride and must therefore point in the direction of eternal fidelity. But “Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.” This will only destroy the relationship of the couple who has idolized Eros, who thought they had “the power and truthfulness of a god.”58
So when we experience sexual desires and ask ourselves, “What is going on? Why are these desires within me, sometimes overwhelming me?” we are beginning to know in what direction to look for answers. No, we are not the same as animals. Sexual intercourse has biological similarities with mammals, but there is more to it than animal passion and the instinct to reproduce. The movies, the song-writers and the novelists are right to use religious language about this whole mysterious chemistry. It does point to a vision beyond itself. It points to the joyful service of God. One important and neglected answer to the question, “Why did God create humankind male and female?” is that we might marry, have children, populate, and steward his world in a God-like manner as creatures made in the image and likeness of God.