God of Chastity, Part II

Christopher West's book Theology of the Body for Beginners is an old topic in this blog — see the earlier entries in my Theology of the Body series about the theological outlook espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, as described in West's book — but today I think of it as, for me, new wine in new skin.

John Paul II made it clear that there is nothing profane about combining "theology" with "the body" or "the flesh" ... as in S-E-X. Indeed, the truth is quite the opposite: there is nothing more appropriate to a Christian outlook. There is nothing more important for the Christian to understand than the reason St. Paul could write, in his letter to the Ephesians:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church — for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. (Ephesians 6:25-32)

This makes it sound as if Christ and the church have a "one flesh," i.e., a marital, relationship — as indeed they do! Relationships of the "flesh" — sex — image or reflect the mysterious love of the three persons that make up the Holy Trinity for one another: Father, Son, and Spirit. This is the meaning of sex.

West calls this the "spousal analogy." To Catholics, as I hope to all Christians, analogies are profound tokens of truth. True, God is all spirit, and his three inner persons do not have "sex lives." But God's self-revelation in the Bible, whether Old Testament or New, uses a spousal analogy at just about every turning. Paul, for example, cites one of the earliest verses in the Bible, Genesis 2:24:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

The idea that Christ, as the Lamb of God, is the "bridegroom" and the church is his "bride" comes to fruition in one of the last Bible verses, Revelation 19:7:

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.

All the way through the Bible, the deep, inner nature of the created world, and of us, is shown as being fundamentally nuptial. "Be fruitful and multiply" is not just something that would be nice for us to do. It is our most basic way of being in conformance with the contours God gave his created universe.


So, yes, I've gone over to "the other side" on some very basic things. In modern parlance, I've had a paradigm shift.

The way I know I've had a paradigm shift is that when I saw, on West's p. 14, "Make no mistake: in the final analysis the abortion debate is not about when life begins. It is about the meaning of sex," I finally got it.

The first two times I read the book, that passage did not even merit being highlighted — though I was assiduously highlighting passages all around it. This time, I thought it deserved highlighting not in my customary blue marking pen but in day-glo pink.

"The meaning of sex." Sex has a meaning? A deep, permanent, nature-of-all-things, fundamental significance, as opposed to what two consenting adults happen to be willing to accord to it, at the moment, if not tomorrow, or next week, or next year? The meaning of sex?

It was like the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake (John Belushi) sees the light:

Jake: "The band ... the band ..."
Rev. Cleophus [James Brown]: "DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!"
Jake: "THE BAND!!!"
Rev. Cleophus: "DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!!"
Elwood [Dan Aykroyd]: "What light?!"
Rev. Cleophus: "DO YOU SEEEE THE LIGHT?!"
Jake: "YES!! YES!! JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST ... I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!!!"

I finally got it. I saw the light. Sex has a meaning. You can't be a serious Christian, not really, until you are willing to admit it. For years, I was unwilling to admit it.

I had all the data at my disposal: how my church wanted its members to act in accordance with that fundamental outlook; how the outlook permeates the Bible. I just didn't see it. I just didn't want to accept that such a contentious, divisive — and, to me, seemingly peripheral — facet of modern-day living as our "right to sexual freedom" should be allowed to divide people, both within the church and outside it.

But it's not peripheral. It's central. It's make-or-break. Marital fidelity, chastity outside marriage, the male-female union as "one flesh" never to be sundered by man, the time of the beginning of life as periperal to the abortion debate, the reason homosexual unions are against God's plan, the reason casual sex, pornography, and masturbation are wrong ... all these hot-button topics of the present day look different to me, post paradigm shift, than they did before.

I no longer think Christians who — such as I myself did, prior to the shift — think they are complete Christians even though they differ with their tradition on issues of sex, gender, marriage, reproduction, and family are actually finished.


Paradigm shifts are funny. Not ha-ha-funny or peculiar-funny. They are funny because you can't really argue about them, or with them. You either see the new paradigm, or you don't.

In a way, I have "understood" what is now my new paradigm for a long, long time. I just didn't get it.

I understood that the church saw issues of the flesh and the body as crucial, where I simply didn't.

I understood that the Bible uses what West calls the "spousal analogy" throughout ... but I thought of old-fashioned analogies as disposable and dispensible, in the modern world.

I understood that God's revelation of his own nature and truth to us in scripture was timeless ... while mentally striking out those ideas that didn't accord with my own way of looking at things!

So I didn't immediately snap to attention the first time or two I read West's sentence about the abortion debate and the meaning of sex. His thought went right over my head. If someone had brought it to my attention, I would have rejected it or tried to explain it away.

A paradigm shift feels like something snapping into place, something seating itself, in your mind, in just the way it is meant to be. You just know, once you have had it, that you'll never be the same. And, sure, you want to share it with everybody. At the same time, mature reflection tells you that they, too, likely have all the data at hand, and unless something just snaps into place for them, they just aren't going to agree with you. They still have that old paradigm, the one you used to have. Paradigm shifts do not lend themselves to easy solidarity.

God of Chastity, Part I

This isn't a particularly easy topic to talk about, but here goes anyway...

Let me put it this way: I believe in God. I also believe that sex should be reserved for marriage. Furthermore, I believe that the truth about God and the truth about chastity, as I'll call the latter, are tightly intertwined.

Once upon a time, it was common knowledge that sex outside marriage was a sin against God. That sex without benefit of marriage was of questionable morality was the understanding I was given as a child in the 1950s, even though I wasn't brought up religious. Then came the Sexual Revolution. Though my contemporaries began availing themselves of "carnal knowledge" at every opportunity — and I was no saint — I never got comfortable with the new idea that "anything goes."

In midlife I became religious for the first time. That was about 20 years ago. But somehow, I never particularly came to believe that being religious necessarily implied being chaste.

Instead, I was of the opinion — see many of my earlier entries in this blog — that the old rules about chastity were passé. Or, at least, they were "optional." They grew out of the same Judeo-Christian tradition that kept women from full equality with men, made abortion and homosexual acts sinful, etc., etc., etc.

Recently, though, I have woken up to the fact that, deep down, I still believe that "family values" are the best values. I never really stopped believing that. I just compartmentalized that idea away from my religious beliefs.

This, despite the fact that I am perfectly well aware, and long have been, that there is no theme more characteristic of Judeo-Christian scripture — the Old Testament and the New — than the sanctity of marriage. It is a bit difficult to detect a "through line" to the narrative of the Bible, but one does seem to be there. In the beginning, Adam and Eve's "marriage" in the Garden of Eden is tainted by Original Sin. In the end, in the Book of Revelation, there is a sacred marriage between Christ, who has come back to this world, and his Church, encompassing all people who are saved.

Along the way, between Genesis and Revelation, we keep getting clues that marriage is sacrosanct. When Abraham and his descendants are told to "be fruitful and multiply," it is within the bounds of marriage that this is to take place. The Old Testament strictures against promiscuity, homosexuality, and masturbation make most sense against this backdrop.

Jesus, with his "one flesh" dictum, took marriage to be sacrosanct. In Matthew 19, we read:

Some Pharisees came to him to test him [Jesus]. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

Though the first post-Resurrection Christians were told by Paul to eschew marriage if they could tolerate celibacy, this seems to have been under the assumption that the Second Coming was imminent and there were, meanwhile, more important things to be done, such as evangelizing the heathen world.

Once the Church began to realize Christ's return might be a long way off, it renewed the ancient Israelite emphasis on the sanctity of marriage, and Paul himself was emphatic in his Letter to the Romans that "anything goes" was not a proper way to worship the Lord. (Paul also wrote in one of his epistles of the need for wives to defer to their husbands ... one of the most resented passages of scripture these days!)

I don't personally claim to know with any certainty how to square scripture with modern-day sexuality is all its most controversial aspects. But I do now claim that it makes no sense to call oneself a Christian or a Jew and not take with the utmost seriousness the claims these religions traditionally make on us to be chaste and to hold marriage sacrosanct.