What the Bible Really Says about Sex

Newsweek's Lisa Miller reports on two new books that purport to offer a more accurate understanding of what the Bible says about sex.  Jennifer Wright Knust authored Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire, and Michael Coogan wrote God and Sex: What the bible Really Says.  They both contend that Christians have misunderstood the Bible's teaching that sex is for marriage between a man and a woman, and that's there's a lot more sex in the Bible than it seems at first glance.

It's true that the Old Testament especially is a pretty earthy text, and a lot of the imagery is lost on us across time and language.  But he reads too much into this in some cases.  He makes the case that feet are used as a sexual allusion in some places, and then concludes that this is also the case when the woman washed and kissed Jesus' feet.  He's probably right about some allusions, but there are also literal things called feet.  And sometimes feet at just feet.  There's nothing in the context of this event to indicate there's an allusion to sex intended.

This kind of wooden illiteralism baffles me in liberal scholarship sometimes.  Another example is Knust's claim that Jonathan and David enjoyed each other sexually because David says, "Your love to me was wonderful."  There are all kinds of love we experience, and we're all quite familiar with the deep love among friends.  Jane Austen famously writes about this kind of love in addition to romantic love.  It's ironic that while Christians like me are often accused of being simplistic and seeing things in black and white, that that is otherwise the case in so-called critical scholarship that seeks to unearth what we've never understood correctly in the Bible.  Knust and Coogan appear to thing all love is sexual love, just like all feet are sexual allusions.  This pays no attention to the details of the text, especially when any clues to sex are utterly missing.

Coogan claims that there is no "traditional marriage" in the Bible and cites a number of examples from the Old Testament we're all familiar with.  But to apply a moral principle to hermeneutics, you can't get an ought from an is.  Just because the Bible reports these things, doesn't mean they were permissible and condoned.  The Old Testament people were very much products of their culture when God calls Abraham out of Ur to begin making a nation to work through.  Change in the secular mores is then slow and incremental over time.  But the ideal of "traditional marriage" is present in the Bible in the model of creation, and it's affirmed in the New Testament in specific moral commands.

Knust offers a truly unique interpretation of what the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah really was: having sex with angels.  He explains that in that time, people believed angels were real and sex with them led to death.  There's a textual problem with this interpretation.  It says that whatever this sin was was ongoing to the extent that it tormented Lot.  Are we to believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were the hook up capital in the region between men and angels?  No, the text tells us it was the behavior of the men of the cities that was the ongoing sin for which they were judged.  Men.  Not angels.  The angels on the scene to warn Lot are the only angels mentioned in the text, so it's really not possible that proscribing sex with angels was the point of the account.  This interpretation illustrates Knust and Coogan's fundamental posture toward the Bible: it's merely a mortal book that reflects the limited cultural beliefs and biases in history. 

I'm completely in favor of finding out what the Bible really means.  You don't have to believe it to be God's word to be able to discern the meaning of the text and do decent hermeneutics.  But if this article is a fair sampling of their books, I'd say we learn more about their biases about the Bible than what the Bible actually says about sex.

Comments

[Paul Rodden]

These two articles shed some interesting light on the subject:

http://tinyurl.com/6dpg7jz
http://tinyurl.com/2agzax2

What do you think?

[KWM]

Another example of wishing the text said something else. So we can sleep easy when our heads hit the pillow.

[Francis Beckwith]

I'd be curious to see how these authors deal with the Pauline and Gospel texts that explicitly address male-female complimentarity and then connect that understanding to the Church as the bride of Christ. Also, it would be interesting to see how they deal with Creation itself, that maleness and femaleness are at the root of our being, that the commandment to honor mother and father was referring to real beings that embody maternity and paternity. I suspect that the authors see sex through the lens of an age that sees it as "doing it" rather than being it. It is the latter that grounds the Christian understanding. But you can't know that without knowing the theological infrastructure from which the Bible arose and its first readers embraced.

It would be like a constitution scholar taking the phrase "general welfare" and inferring that it requires a food stamps program.

[Austin]

Francis,

There are people that do that with the constitution :(

[Paul Rodden]

Oops!

I sat up when I saw, "I'd be curious to see how these authors deal with the Pauline and Gospel texts that explicitly address male-female complimentarity...", and got more amazed as I read further. (At that stage, I hadn't looked at the author, assuming he/she was non-Catholic), and so I was going to say, 'Well look at Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body'! :)

But then, when I did see the author, it struck me how, 'one, holy, catholic, and apostolic', describes something real that has such a recognisable signature which is metaphysical rather than epistemological, too.

It's more than merely 'like minds', and something I had never experienced so palpably before...

[PTB]

Question I've always had is "who is considered married"? Are non-Christians married, since they basically made their pledges to each other to a foreign god, or to no god at all? Does the Christian God here their requests? And if He does in this context, are there other requests of non-Christians that he would answer or grant?

I know many Christians say that they acknowledge people as married IF the state does so. But what if the state change the rules? What if the couple is a common law couple that just lives together for 7 years and the state deems them married?

And for those who may think non-Christians arent married, then if they do decide to become Christians, should they marry again - this time, under the true God of Christianity.

[Paul Rodden]

You raise some important issues, PTB, and too may to be dealt with in a combox, but maybe the problem arises also in terms of (re)baptism? That is, even in a purely Christian context.

For, when it comes to believer's baptism, many Christians, contrary to the Nicene Creed, get rebaptised, and some have multiple 'baptisms', because 'This time, it's the real thing. This time I truly believe'. (Until the next time. As if the congregation they belong to at this moment in time supersedes those they've been baptised into before.)

It seems to me that both these problems arise from a non-sacramental view of these matters which, therefore, relies on the feelings, decisions, or actions of the individual, and not grace.