Men and women in this Western world are intrigued, stimulated, enchanted, bemused, and certainly preoccupied by sex. They are also confused, perplexed, hurt, alienated, and depressed by it.
Daily in our consultation rooms we physicians see patients with sexual or sex-related problems. The frigid woman, the impotent man. The adolescent girl plagued with doubts about her feminity because “she doesn’t”; the adolescent boy unsure of his masculinity either because “he hasn’t” or because “he has” in a setting where sexual enjoyment was practically impossible. We see wives who feel unloved because of their husbands’ lack of tenderness and sexual expression, spending their nights in lonely agony huddled on their side of the bed. Even more often in this society where the strange tradition still flourishes that women don’t have sexual needs, we see husbands who feel they are unloved (and indeed are sexually unloved) by their wives.
In one study, Burnap and Golden report that the average physician sees 230 cases of sexual problems per year, and that a full 70 percent of these are husbands and wives needing help in their marital sexual adjustment.
In this culture seemingly gone mad with sex and also torn with sexual perplexities and problems, what does the Church have to say about sex? The only thing I hear from the Church at large is negative. “No contraception” from the Roman Catholic side. “No premarital or extramarital sex” from various church circles, including the evangelical.
Where do we hear the Church saying to modern men and women, “This is where your personal and sexual needs will be met and fulfilled”? “This is God’s answer to your sexual preoccupation”? Where do we see the Church giving a positive answer to modern man’s endless questioning in the arts, in the media, and in his own mind about the full realization of sexuality and sensuality?
The Church has failed to give God’s answers to this intense questioning, apparently in a misguided attempt to avoid appearing prurient. This is a serious charge to make, but from my personal experience as a church member, from my clinical experience as a psychiatrist, and from my study of God’s word, it seems to be valid.
God does not leave us alone to work through the conflicting attitudes toward our sensuality that we find within our society and within ourselves. He has very much indeed to say to us on this important subject.
Search the Scriptures through and through and you find in them no hint that sex within marriage is to be suppressed, repressed, or even sublimated. Nowhere are human sexuality and the full enjoyment of it denied or derided. Rather, in the Word of God we find sex openly discussed without a hint of shame or reproach, fully taken for granted as an important part of existence, and this for man and for woman equally. In fact, human sexuality and its outworkings are repeatedly used to illustrate God’s own dealings with man.
Scriptural attitudes toward sex are well summarized in Paul’s statement to Timothy that “God gave these things to well taught Christians to enjoy and be thankful for” (The Living Bible) and in the teaching in Hebrews that “marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled.”
Three passages from the New Testament confront us with the mind of God on this subject. First, in Matthew 19:4–6 Jesus says this:
And he answered and said, Have ye not read, that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh? So that they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
In this key New Testament passage on sex and marriage, Jesus substantially repeats Genesis 2:23 and 24. There is no mention here of the notion of romantic love held so dear by Western man, though a lovely and helpful notion it is. Neither is there mention of that concept so prominent in churchly literature, of commitment to the spouse in the marriage contract prior to sexual intercourse, though a noble and helpful concept this is. Jesus simply states the essence of our motivation to marry—our maleness and our femaleness: “He who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother.…”
But he doesn’t stop there: “For this cause shall a man … cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh. So that they are no more two, but one flesh.”
Now, surely Christ is not saying that simply in the sexual act a man and a woman become one flesh? Yes, that is precisely what he is saying. And so that we will not miss the full force of this point, Paul restates it even more vividly in First Corinthians 6:16–18:
Know ye not that he that is joined [cleaves] to a harlot is one body? For, The twain, saith he, shall become one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
What could be more totally physical than sexual relations with a prostitute? Yet, says the apostle, these two also become “one flesh.”
Then, as if to seal this teaching on the centrality of the physical union in the man-woman relationship, Jesus adds in the Matthew passage, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” One can only believe, in the face of all this, that the physical sexual act creates a spiritual bond, recognized and sanctioned by God.
This is a high view of intercourse. But when we stop and think about it, it is right; it is true to our deepest natures. Sexual intercourse involves many aspects and attributes of man and woman other than the physical (the need for intimate companionship is a prominent example). But the sexual act is first of all a supremely and gloriously physical act, one filled with seemingly limitless sensuality, one that draws forth our most intense animal vitality. It is an act abounding in wonderful physical excitement and satiety for both partners. And it is in this physical act that a man and woman become “one flesh.”
Masters and Johnson, who do not write from a Christian orientation, catch the essence of this “one flesh” concept in their chapter on the treatment of female frigidity:
Frequently, it is of help to assure the wife that once the marital unit is sexually joined, the penis belongs to her just as the vagina belongs to her husband. When vaginal penetration occurs, both partners have literally given of themselves as physical beings, in order to derive pleasure from each other [Human Sexual Inadequacy, Little, Brown, 1970].
C. S. Lewis in his usual lucid way puts the matter like this in The Screwtape Letters:
Now comes the joke. The enemy described a married couple as “one flesh.” He did not say a “happily married couple” or a “couple who married because they were in love,” but you can make humans ignore that. You can also make them forget that the man they call Paul did not confine it to married couples. Mere copulation, for him, makes “one flesh.” You can thus get the humans to accept as rhetorical eulogies of “being in love” what were in fact plain descriptions of the real significance of sexual intercourse. The truth is that where ever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured [Macmillan, 1941, p. 93].
This reality of man and woman being “one flesh” is used by Paul as the basis for his comments on the conduct of the husband toward the wife in Ephesians 5. And it is clear from the context that this also underlies his thinking when in First Corinthians 7:3–5 he says this about the sexual relationship between the marital pair:
Let the husband render unto the wife her due: and likewise also the wife unto her husband. The wife hath not power over her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not power over his own body, but the wife. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be by consent for a season, that ye may give yourselves unto prayer, and may be together again, that Satan tempt you not because of your incontinency.
The idea explicit here of the woman demanding “her due” sounds strange to one brought up in our Western traditions, and especially in our Western church traditions. And it is interesting to note that the Apostle Paul, often portrayed as a woman-hating bachelor, places the right of the woman to make the sexual demand on her husband first in the order of things sexual. What the wife asks in sex, says Paul, the husband delivers, and the same for the wife to the husband. His body is hers to command in sex, and he has total power over her body.
What a thunderously radical idea: he is to be totally subject to her every sexual whim and fancy, and she to his!
“You mean, O God, that the sexual part of me is now to be placed totally at the command of another? You mean, O God, that I am to be fully responsive to her craving for the touch, the taste, and the feel of me? You mean this, even if I am unconsciously terrified of what she might do to me? You mean, O God, that if she asks I am to give, I am to respond without reservation? You mean, too, that if I ask she is to respond in like fashion to the urgent sensuality within me?”
To all these questions, and more such, God answers in Holy Writ with a clear voice: “Yes, my boy, you do not have power over your own body; your wife does. And likewise, your wife does not have power over her own body; you do.”
If we are honest, we must conclude, “Yes, He is right again. If I had lived that attitude in regard to my sexuality my wife would be a happier person today. If my wife had lived that attitude regarding her sexuality, I would be a more fulfilled person today.”
And I know that if the husbands and wives I see in my offices day by day would adopt this attitude toward their sexuality, they too would be happier people.
But it is not only in regard to the sexual side of our natures that we as Christians have come to understand that to subject ourselves to another is to find ourselves. We have come to recognize the profound truth set forth by Jesus when he said, “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” We are not at all upset when Peter refers to us as “free” and as “bond-servants of God” in the very same breath.
What Paul has to say here, in First Corinthians 7, in regard to sex is fully consistent with that paradoxical teaching that it is only in subjection to Another that we humans find freedom. Only in complete subjection of our bodies—and hence of ourselves—to our wives can we as men find freedom for fully experiencing our sexuality and our masculinity. Only in the full and free subjection of our wives to us will they fully experience their sexuality and their femininity. Only in this bondage are we able to fully love and be loved. Only in this bondage will we find freedom to know ourselves as sexual sensate beings, free to depend on another for the satisfaction of this most intimate need of our natural being.
And only in this total submission of self to the other can the partners find relief from the sexual abuse that we doctors so frequently hear about in our offices: the bartering of sexual favors for some wished for behavior on the part of the spouse; rejection; sexual one-upmanship and gamesmanship; sexual withdrawal as punishment. Only in this acceptance of our total responsiveness to the other, even in the absence of a mutual sense of romantic love—in fact, even in the presence of mutual hostility—can we as husbands and wives bring into our marriages the therapeutic effectiveness of sexual intimacy, the healing balm for those rifts that so often arise and grow between us.
Indeed, it is only in each other that husbands and wives can fully know themselves as God created them: in the full sensate nature of their beings. In the sexual act the two become “one flesh”; each without the other is incomplete, forever unfulfilled and less than whole.
