A Conversation about Sex and Marriage

A Conversation about Sex and Marriage
James Robert Ross
with excerpts from Lauren Winner (Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity, Brazos, 2005)

Lauren Winner, a young Jewish woman, made her mark as an author in Girl Meets God, the story of her encounter with Christ and her conversion as his disciple. In Real Sex she undertakes the task of rethinking her assumptions about sex which she absorbed and incorporated into her own life style during the sexual revolution.

This is an honest, courageous book. The author is brutally honest with herself about herself, about the state of her soul, about her own sexual choices and about the difficulties in the exercise of chastity.
This is a Biblically informed, theologically sound book. It is not a jeremiad against the joys of a little sexual hanky panky. Rather, it describes the meaning of sex in the context of what it means to be human, especially to be a human being who has been called by God into a covenant relationship of which marriage is the most profound and significant symbol. Ms. Winner demonstrates how sex is intricately tied up with our personal identity and with our relationship not only with the warm body in bed beside us but with our neighbors, the church and ultimately with the God who invented sex.
Finally, this is a helpful book. When the author describes many of the church’s moralistic truisms and observes how unhelpful they are, she strikes a chord with all who live and breathe in a sexually saturated atmosphere and have struggled with lust, pornography, and infidelity. In contrast she offers concrete, meaningful suggestions about Christian sexual discipline and formation. In so doing she presents a compelling critique of our ultra individualistic culture and how it has infected and controlled the way Christians see their responsibility for each other.
You are encouraged to purchase and together read and discuss the entire book. But here are a few excerpts, which will help you reflect upon your relationship to each other, your relationship to the church, the meaning of marriage and the significance of sex for your marriage.
Ms. Winner begins by confessing that she experiences the church's teaching about sex as difficult. She writes:
I chafe against [this teaching]. Sometimes it feels outmoded, irrelevant, burdensome. But to rely on my experience here would be to rely on something frankly broken and distorted. Sometimes it is scary or inconvenient to trust the church. But it is more often a relief to know that I don't have to rely solely on my intuition or experience to make decisions about ethical behavior. The church is here to teach me how to handle sex, money,. time, relationships, and myriad other issues.
So, if my point in bringing together ethics and experience is not to say, "Oh, in the twenty-first century, these teachings are just too hard; let's toss scripture and tradition out the window and embrace fornication"–why, then, talk about people's lived experience at all? Is doing so a concession to the voyeuristic tell-all that characterizes so much of today's popular culture? I think not. For if our ethics of sex should not be primarily grounded in experience, our pastoral response to sex must take account of it. By pastoral, I mean something broader than simply what clergy do; I mean the compassionate and wise response of all brothers and sisters in the Christian community to those siblings in Christ Struggling with questions of sex and chastity.
We Christians insist that bodies and what we do with them are important. We insist that sex was created for marriage alone, and that unmarried Christians shouldn't have sex. But if we want to do more than insist-if we want to help these unmarried Christians inhabit chastity-we ought to know something about what role sex plays in their lives…
The sixth and seventh chapter of Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians show both how broad and how specific the category of porneia [usually translated “fornication” or “sexual immorality”] is. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul invokes porneia when he is forbidding Corinthians from patronizing prostitutes. In the next chapter, Paul uses porneia again, this time telling the unmarried and the widows that it is better to marry than to burn with desire. In this second passage, logic tells us that porneia must mean sex outside of marriage–if the only two options are marriage or smoldering with desire, it follows that sex outside of marriage is not an option. And, according to Paul, this sin is no minor peccadillo. As Lewis Smedes [in Sex for Christians] summarizes, "If unmarried sexual intercourse was wrong, it was a serious wrong; it ought not even be talked about (Eph. 5:3). God's will is that we abstain from fornication, not giving way to 'the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God' (1 Thess. 4:6). [Porneia] is sin; intercourse by unmarried people is [porneia], therefore intercourse by unmarried people is sin."
Scripture gives us a context for reading the rest of scripture, and what we learn about God's vision for sexuality in Genesis shapes how we understand words about sexuality in the rest of the Bible. Paul understands sex as part of the ordering of creation. Paul's words cannot be unhinged from his larger vision of the world, a vision set out at the beginning of scripture.
This is not just a lesson in reading. It is also a pastoral point.
Consider, as an example, the recent experience of my friend Kara, a campus minister in Illinois. Recently a student came to her, on fire for the Lord, and said, "I want to follow and serve Jesus, and the one thing I really want to know is, how far can I go with my boyfriend?" One could, I suppose, answer that question simply by pointing to a few verses from Paul, but a more complete, and perhaps more compelling, instruction is to begin with the picture of intended reality that is laid out in Genesis. Kara realized that answering her student's question required first answering a host of larger questions: Who created us, and for what ends? What is God's creational intent? and What are we made for?
I'll hazard a guess about Kara's student. When she's sitting on the sofa in a dark den with her boyfriend, random verses from Paul may not do much work. However, if this student's community helps form in her an understanding that she is God's creature, made for God's best purposes, she may indeed think very differently-even righteously-about sex, and bodies, and the context in which those bodies are to touch and be touched.
Our bodies and how we inhabit them point to the order of creation. God made us for sex within marriage…To see the biblical witness as an attempt to direct us to the created order…is to recognize the true goodness of God's creation; things as they were in the Garden of Eden are things at their most nourishing, they are things as they are meant to be…
Americans insist that sex is private, nobody’s business but mine and the person with whom I’m doing it. I can show you my midriff in public, and I can make out with my boyfriend on a park bench, but there is no communal grammar that allows you to talk to me about this body I am exposing in front of you…[Thus] society’s most basic message about sex: one person’s sexual behavior is not anyone else’s concern. And if your best friend doesn't have permission to voice her worry when you commit adultery with both its blatant violation of the Ten Commandments and its obvious capacity to hurt other people and wreak social havoc– certainly no one has permission to utter a word about a little thing like premarital sex.
Put simply, this is a lie. And it is a fairly new lie. For most of human history, people of many different cultures have agreed that societies must order certain forms of exchange in order to survive. Communities have ordered language, establishing grammars and vocabularies that shape how people communicate with one another; they have ordered the exchange of money, property, and labor; and they have ordered the practice sex. As essayist, poet, and novelist Wendell Berry has put "Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody's business."
In the last half-century, however, that assumption has been routed, replaced by the axioms of individualism and autonomy. Indeed, today the idea that sex "is everybody's business" sounds alternately shocking and silly. Instead, we are more prone to think like my friend Roxanne, who chuckles and says, "Look, we're two consenting adults. Why is what we do under the sheets anyone else's concern?"
There are, of course, some practical answers to Roxanne's question, not least that her sex is my business because sex can lead to babies, and the society that Roxanne and I share has a vested interest in defining and maintaining the family structures that care for babies.
But Roxanne and her boyfriend use condoms, so it is easy for her to dismiss any concern I might have about kids. Today, thanks to the Pill, we can generally (if not completely) sever the connection between sex and child-making; indeed, the advent reliable birth control was a major factor in privatizing sex in the West. "I'm not going to burden society with an unexpected and unwanted child," says Roxanne, "so I'm free to do what I want, right?”
To be honest, I appreciate Roxanne's rejection of my practical and pragmatic suggestion that sex is communal because babies are communal. Procreation ought not be severed from sexual conversation (we will return to procreation in the next apter); but arguing that sex is "everybody's business" only cause everybody is interested in preserving stable families which children can be reared is on some level a practical argument, and practical arguments are, finally, unsatisfying, cause they don't get at the core of what's at stake.
It is sometimes hard for me to talk to Roxanne about sex cause she and I don't share some basic assumptions. For starters the way I talk about sex is conditioned by the beginning of Genesis…Marriage serves as the biblical analogy par excellence to the relationship between God and His people…Marriage–because of what marriage is, the analogue to God and His relationship to His people–precedes sex. This ordering of marriage and sex–the understanding that marriage contains sex, rather than that sex adorns marriage–implies a resonance between sex and community.
But perhaps a more important disagreement between Roxanne and me has to do with individualism. The actors in Roxanne’s question are “two consenting adults,” unmoored from any community or society, free to make their own decisions. So long as they don’t violate the other’s consent, they can do as they please…
In a world where the basic unit of ethical meaning is the individual, Roxanne’s stance carries real weight. But in the Christian universe, the individual is not the vital unit of ethical meaning. For Christians, the most basic images, metaphors, and signs are corporate, and the basic unit of ethical meaning is the Body, the community…
The community has a role in making ethics. Paul makes this clear when he instructs the Galatians to hold one accountable for sin: “Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other’s burdens, and this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
That passage in Galatians, if we construe it uncharitably, can lead us to envision a community that functions primarily as a police force: Christians’ responsibilities to one another begin and end with peering into other Christians’ bedroom windows and sounding the alarm if something illicit is going on.
While one task of any community is to enforce its own codes when they are being violated, perhaps the prior task of the community is to make sense of the ethical codes that are being enforced. Here the community is not so much cop as storyteller, telling and retelling the foundational stories of the community itself, sustaining the stories that make sense of the community’s norms. This storytelling is part of the working out of God’s grace in the church. We, the church, retell our own story–we do this every time we read scripture, every time we celebrate the Lords’ Supper, and (hopefully) every time we minister to one another. And that retelling is part of what enables us to live into the story. It is the community that ensures that ethics is not about the dispensing of cut-and-dried answers to moral questions, but that ethic is a story with meaning and power…
Speaking to one another about our sexual selves is just one (admittedly risky) instance of a larger piece of Christian discipleship: being community with each other.