Sex Won't Save You

A response to The Gospel Coalition and Joshua Ryan Butler

If you missed the recent TGC article, Sex Won’t Save You, by Joshua Ryan Butler, consider yourself blessed and highly favored by God. The resultant brouhaha of outraged responses on social media was the PR equivalent of a natural disaster. As an abuse survivor myself, I found the piece triggering and disturbing. As a woman, I found it objectifying, and as a Christian, I found it theologically dubious at best.

Immediately upon reading it, I contacted my editors at The Gospel Coalition (TGC). I suggested that, in order to make amends and peace with their offended readership, they should publish a response that corrects Butler’s oversexed and erroneous theology.

They agreed.

We agreed on an outline, and as I burned through my weekend researching, writing, and editing, I was emailed several times by TGC to ask how things were going, and how soon I could have the article ready.

However, a few days after submitting the piece, I was dismayed when they rejected it, saying, “Since Thursday when I asked you to write this piece, and after prayerful consideration, our leadership decided to respond to Josh Butler’s article with our own statement of apology.”

While I am grateful for TGC’s apology and for taking down Butler’s article, I do not consider this enough. When we platform bad theology or disseminate false information - particularly about Jesus Christ - we are morally obligated to correct it. Although I had nothing to do with Butler’s piece, these issues are important. The dignity of Jesus is important. Equipping the church to avoid dangerous doctrine which harms God’s people and may enable abuse, is important.

So, here is the piece which TGC rejected.

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One of the most beautiful metaphors in all of Scripture is that of Jesus and his Bride. The allegorical love story begins in the Old Testament. Israel, the Bride of the Lord, struggles to remain faithful to her Holy Husband. Seduced by false gods, she spiritually commits adultery. She cheats on her Redeemer with idols and false religion. By taking part in sex cults and mixing the worship of God with pagan practices, the Bride of the Lord defiles herself.

But then the Heir of Heaven intervenes. He leads a perfect life devoid of any sin. He heals the sick and forgives their transgressions. He teaches his people and raises the dead. He treats women with dignity and men with mercy. He is falsely accused, taken captive, tortured, and nailed to a cross. The Bridegroom, the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, sacrificed his life to save his fallen Bride. This fraught love story, this imperfect union, is made perfect and beautiful by the grace of God alone.

Now the church – the Bride of Christ – is preparing herself for his Second Coming. Clothing herself in the righteousness he gave her, she eagerly awaits the return of her beloved. But Jesus hasn’t returned yet, and while Heaven is a promise and the Kingdom of God is at hand, we’re still troubled by sin in a world bent on depravity.

Sexology

It should be no surprise then that promiscuity, sexual deviance, and perversion continue to compromise the church. Like Moses and Aaron in Deuteronomy 23:16-18, the Apostles also encountered cult prostitutes and deviance; religions that viewed sex as an act of worship. Today, with the boom of the internet, we are several generations deep in people who grew up looking at pornography. Many pastors, elders, fathers, and authors think more like Andrew Tate and less like Jesus Christ.

Such men, whether they realize it or not, view the world and God’s Word through a prism of sexual narcissism. While claiming to represent Jesus, they objectify women, idolize sex, confuse lasciviousness with love, and interpret Scripture through a lens of lust. Their over-sexed mindset becomes their hermeneutic.

But perhaps you think I’m exaggerating.

During my early twenties, I met a Bible teacher and his third wife. The husband’s favorite animal was a lion. The wife’s was a lamb. Prior to their marriage, they misread Isaiah 11:6 – the lion shall lie down with the lamb – and interpreted it as Biblical grounds for them to have sex, even though the husband was still married to his second wife at the time.

In Luke 1:35, an angel tells Mary, “’The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.’” By reading this verse through a pornographic vocabulary, some have wrongly interpreted it to mean that God had sexual intercourse with Mary.

In an upcoming book, one Christian author states that sex is a picture of Jesus giving us the Gospel. He writes, “Christ arrives in salvation to be not only with his church but within his church … Christ penetrates his church with the generative seed of his Word and the life-giving presence of his Spirit, which takes root within her and grows to bring new life into the world.”

He goes on to compare Christ’s crucifixion with rape, saying, “At the cross, he stands in solidarity with the survivor through his suffering. As his own body is ravaged and the spear pierces his side, he identifies with the sexually assaulted in the brutality inflicted upon them.”

When Jesus was stripped naked and publicly humiliated, he did experience what we’d legally define today as sexual assault. However, equating the penetration of a spear with sexual intercourse is distinctly unorthodox. Interestingly, in criminal profiling, serial killers who stab their victims are often said to be sexually motivated. What the author is describing then is predator psychology, not Christian theology.

The Two Become One

Another example of hyper-sexed hermeneutics is a misinterpretation of Genesis 2:23-24. Adam praises God for his beautiful bride, saying, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” Following this, Moses notes, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

In the centuries since these beautiful words were written, many dubious interpretations have sprung up. Like the thorns that sprung from the ground after the Fall, bad theology wraps razor sharp lies around the words of Jesus and the souls he came to save.

I once spoke to a woman who thought that the souls of a husband and wife would morph into one soul once they reached Heaven. Others have read sexual inuendo into the text, claiming that when “two become one,” and a husband “holds fast,” God is describing copulation.

However, Jesus cites those exact words from Genesis, adding, “They are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Mark 10:8-9

Jesus cannot be talking about sex, and he cannot think that Moses was talking about sex, because the two are not to separate. Unless we are willing to draw the ludicrous conclusion that husbands and wives are to remain in a constant state of intercourse, sex cannot be what “the two become one” or “hold fast” means. Rather, unity between a husband and wife is a profound spiritual, emotional, and relational togetherness. It is a oneness that far exceeds physical proximity.

The boy who once clung to his mother’s skirt or held fast to his father’s hand, must grow up and let go. He must become independent of his parents and hold fast to his wife. She is now his shelter, helper, provider, and counselor (Proverbs 31:11-29). She is now bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. Harmonized, unified, separate yet inseparable, their love and understanding for one another nears mystical. The intrinsic bond between a boy and his parents must pale in comparison to the bond between a man and his dearest friend.

Upon seeing Eve for the first time, Adam rejoiced, saying, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” And yet, at this point, the two were still virgins. So, how could they have now - in that moment - been one flesh, unless the oneness Adam spoke of meant something far more than physical?

In the beginning, God did create the birds and the bees. And it was good. But marriage – the beautiful union between a husband and wife – is far more profound than reproduction. Otherwise, we’re no different than the animals.

Sexualizing Jesus

These dangerous mindsets which impose a sexual spin on God’s Word, worm their way to the very heart of the Gospel. By elevating sex to the level of sacrament, they reduce the marriage bed to a church-endorsed romp. When sex is reduced to the physical experience of one partner (typically the man), husbands and wives are degraded to the level of cult prostitutes, and by extension, the beautiful picture of Jesus Christ and his Bride is reduced to sexual inuendo and pornographic malarky.

To be sure, Jesus was a man. As such, he had testosterone, emotions, and a need for companionship. But we cannot project our own sins or motivations onto Jesus. Rather, we must allow Jesus to tell us who he is; to define his intentions, desires, character, and values.

Jesus never objectified women. He never sexualized or condescended to them. He never preached that a wife’s role is to satisfy her husband sexually, nor was his ministry sex-centric or even marriage centric. On the contrary, Jesus remained celibate. He treated women with a dignity that would be striking today, let alone circa 30AD. Jesus did not value or define people based on their sexual desirability or skills in bed. As Mary sat at her Savior’s feet, he taught her just as he would teach any man.

As a child abuse survivor, this is incredibly important to me. I love Jesus dearly. Seeing him degraded and sexualized is profoundly distressing and hurts me on a personal level. This is the Jesus who helped me survive domestic violence. This is the Jesus who healed me from sexual abuse. This is the Jesus who was faithful and held me fast when I was so devastated, I wanted to kill myself. This is the Jesus who didn’t abandon me even when no one in the church seemed to care.

Jesus is not predatorial.

Jesus is not sexually motivated.

Jesus is love.

Jesus is safety.

Jesus is holy.

When church leaders normalize graphic depictions of sex in theology – when they depict Jesus as a sexual aggressor, “penetrating” his Bride to spread the “seed” of his Word – they throw our church doors wide open to abusers, rapists, and child predators. Having grown accustomed to such language, women, children, and the vulnerable among us, may come to think it’s OK when men are inappropriate toward them.

If the people of God are taught that Jesus is sexually dominant and that God speaks to women and children in a sexually charged manner, then when a predator speaks to a child this way, the child may mistakenly think the predator is being Christlike. At that point, the Word of God has been used to make a little boy or girl psychologically vulnerable to a pedophile. This is a millstone level abomination.

The Wedding Supper of the Lamb

Like Mary, someday you and I will sit at Jesus’s feet and listen to him teach. Just as at The Last Supper, when the disciples lounged around a table with Jesus, we too will eat and drink with God. But the Wedding Supper of the Lamb will be a joyous celebration. Christ’s metaphorical bride – the men and women all around him – will laugh, talk, rest, and rejoice. There will be no more death, sorrow, sin, or shame. There will be no more misogyny, sexualization, or the weaponization of God’s Word to abuse or objectify.

And that’s where God’s romantic analogy stops.

You see, in the Bible, we never read about The Lamb’s Honeymoon Suite. The two never become one in a sexual manner. In fact, in the final scene, the Bride is fully clothed. Revelation 19:7-8 tells us, “‘Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure’— for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.”

The epitome of Christ’s relationship with us – the summation, the climax, and the grand finale of his abounding love – is a celestial fellowship dinner with his siblings.

In that place, all our sins will be washed away. As we break manna and drink wine, we won’t be distracted with bickering about gender roles and sex. We won’t be worried by the way our brother in Christ is ogling us. We won’t be troubled by spiritual abuse or the strange ideas some hold to in this world. We’ll be clothed in righteousness, purified in mind, overwhelmed by his mercy, and eternally secure in his loving arms.

Just as Moses commended godly husbands to do, Jesus Christ will hold fast to his Bride. He always has. In a beautiful echo of those words back in Genesis, David praises the Bridegroom of the Church, saying, “If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” Psalm 139:9-10

Special thanks to Briggham Winkler and Rachel Vann for their patience, encouragement, and help editing this piece.

Preview image Photo by Wendel Moretti.