Sex, Love, and Faith. Do They Connect?

BEHAVIORS OF LOVE  - By Scot McKnight

One day after a session of my class Women, the Bible, and the Church—a class that explores both what the Bible says about women and a theology of relationships—a young woman asked me if she could talk to me. In less than five minutes she said these things: “This class comes at the perfect time for me. I’ve been living with my boyfriend for a year. I never wanted to but he insisted, and a few weeks back he got mad and left. I’ve not seen him since. I need this class to think again about who I am and what it 
means to love a man. Thanks.”

“I’m glad you are taking this class,” I said. And she walked away. It made me head back to my office pondering what my students might be going through — most of them in silence.

After interviewing scads of young women who opened up the closets of their hooking-up practices to her, Laura Sessions Stepp spoke of the damage this does to young women: “A girl can tuck a Trojan in her purse on Saturday night, but there is no such device to protect her heart.”

In other words, there’s more to sex than the body. Sex implicates the emotions. Because there is no prophylactic for the heart, many today suppress the emotions involved in a genuine relationship. A professor of health education at Indiana University asks this question: “Hooking up is purposely uncaring. If they turn off the emotional spigot during this time, what will happen to them as older adults?”

Listen to these words of a young woman: “You’re supposed to know what to do and how to do it and how to feel during and afterward. You learn to turn everything off except your body and make yourself
emotionally invulnerable.”

And yet another woman expresses how she has learned to steel herself against the pain, but she makes her point in a question that reveals the self-inflicted wounds of our sexual culture: “Does that part of us that seeks connection eventually start to break down when we no longer associate sex with love?”

After interviewing college students who had been involved in sex with partners to whom they were not committed, Donna Freitas observes, “After a few years of living in the environment they felt exhausted, spent, emptied by the pressure to participate in encounters that left them unfulfilled.” While some emerging adults do (rarely) report general sexual and emotional happiness after sex with uncommitted partners, studies show that more than half used words like these to describe how

they feel …

regret

dirty

used

guilty

empty

ashamed

alone

miserable

duped

And even … abused.

Some have to take a bath to feel clean, and some struggle for a sense of forgiveness for months. In fact, Donna Freitas found most had dashed hopes after casual sexual encounters. One young man writes, “I often feel as though I’ve betrayed myself and my values by being physically intimate with someone I do not share an emotional intimacy with.” One young woman, in her journal, writes: “[I] feel bad about myself (like a sleaze) … Feel empty … I degraded myself.”

There is not a chance under the kingdom’s sun that Jesus wants anyone to feel degraded because of a sexual relationship. There’s something seriously wrong with sex when the gift of God makes us feel ashamed or dirty. Sex is designed for pleasure and the intimacy of love, and scientific research is just beginning to unravel some of sex’s mysteries.

SEX AND SCIENCE

Some in medical research examine what goes on when two people engage in sexual behaviors. First, from simple and casual skin-to-skin touching to the heightened pleasures of orgasm, the brain releases a neurochemical called dopamine, which tells your brain that what you are doing feels very good. To grasp the magnitude of the body’s chemical response, we need to know that sexual pleasure and drugs both generate the same dopamine experience. The pleasure of sex, therefore, is like the pleasure of an addicting drug. At its simplest, dopamine is designed by God to create the desire to have more sex. But there’s more to sex neurochemically than pleasure.

The brains of both men and women release neurochemicals during sexual behaviors that also say: “I am bonding emotionally with you.” Oxytocin tells a woman’s brain that the man is hers and vasopressin tells the man’s brain that the woman is his.

Here is an alarming medical conclusion: Bonding occurs chemically whenever sexual relations occur — not just when a person chooses bonding to occur and not just when a person is intimately in love with another person.

One more brain item: When anyone engages in sexual behaviors, the brain creates pathways of connection that render that experience easier to repeat and, in fact, that render that experience something the brain wants to repeat over and over. That is, synaptic pathways, or tunnels of sexual 
pleasure, are created in the brain simply by engaging in sexual behaviors.

Which leads to a problem. When a young man or a young woman begins to sleep around or share sexual experiences with more than one person, shame and feeling dirty result because our God-designed brain gets confused. That sense of feeling dirty is partly the neurochemicals in the brain saying, “I’m confused. Who is this new person you are having sex with?”

What we all need to keep in mind is that our brain and neurochemicals remember the synaptic pathways of former lovers. This is exactly what the comments of the young adults above were leading to. Those who engage in sexual behaviors are opening brain flow that can become massively complex and frustrating for the person who wants to create multiple bonding experiences. The question the young people I quoted above are asking is the right one: Does this behavior create obstacles for future healthy intimacy and obstacles for the possibility of long-term faithful, loving relationship?

The answer, according to science, is yes. Sex devoid of relational commitment confuses our brain’s neurochemicals and begins to corrode our capacity for one of our deepest yearnings: the yearning for 
commitment and faithfulness, or bonding with someone who loves us. Let me put this more forcefully: It is impossible to engage in the hookup culture without damaging your brain’s innate desire for healthy, faithful, emotional bonding. Alicia makes this confession: “I also realized that hooking up had  influenced my notions of self-worth, love, relationships and expectations of men in ways I hadn’t realized.”

I assure you, there’s a better way. It’s the kingdom way.

SEX AND LOVE

Jesus’s view of sex and love were profoundly Jewish, and that means they emerged out of Israel’s story and Israel’s Scriptures, what Christians today call the Old Testament. In that context, love and sex were about consummating marriage, procreation, expression of love and pleasure — but all of this in the context of a rugged, realistic lifetime commitment where the body really does matter.

Let’s begin with the idea that the body really does matter, because for some Christians the body is inferior to the soul or spirit or mind. Therefore, to them, what the body does doesn’t really matter. That’s a form of Gnosticism.

For others, while they think what they do with their body does matter, they can’t integrate their spirituality into their embodiedness. So, instead of seeing their body as important to following Jesus, they let it tag along to the spirituality game they play but hope the body keeps quiet the whole 
time and perhaps sits in the corner without attracting attention to itself.

The one thing Jesus learned in the Jewish world was that the body isn’t a container for the spirit but that the body is fully integrated with spirit. For Jesus, there is complete integration of body and spirit. So, it can be put this way: The reason Jesus and his Jewish world talked about sex and bodies so much was because the body was so important. Your body matters and what you do with your body is your spirituality!

Jesus’ view of rugged, realistic commitment can be found in what he taught about divorce. At the time of Jesus there were two basic views, as there are in most cultures on most issues most of the time. One group believed that divorce should be granted permissively and for any good reason, and that a permissible divorce meant a permissible remarriage. A famous rabbi, Hillel, is credited with this view. 

Another group, led by a rabbi named Shammai, thought the only permissible ground of divorce (and remarriage) was what Moses taught in Deuteronomy 24:1. The verse indicates that a man might become displeased with his wife if he “finds something indecent“ about her. On those two Hebrew words, erwat dabar (“something indecent”), the fate of families hung. For Shammai, something indecent meant sexual immorality like adultery or incest. But for Hillel it meant whatever displeased the man — and the expansiveness of that was later illustrated to be as broad as: “Even if she burns your toast!”

In this context of a raging debate about permissiveness in divorce and remarriage, we get this report from Matthew 19: “Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?’ “ (v. 3).

That is, they are asking if Hillel is right: Can you get a permissible divorce for most any reason you can find? Jesus’ response astounded even his disciples, and he gives his answer in three parts, and these three all illustrate that Jesus believed that marriage was permanent and that sexual relations and love make sense only within that context:

#1: God makes the marriage. “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (v. 6).

#2: Divorce was only permitted due to sin. “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning” (v. 8).

#3: Marriage is permanent. “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual
 immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery” (v. 9).

His disciples, because they had imbibed the permissiveness of their own culture, were shocked. They said:

“If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry” (v. 10).

So Jesus took their comment to the opposite, morally zealous extreme: Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others have been made eunuchs; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it. (vv. 11 –12)

If those words don’t illustrate the moral zeal of Jesus and his belief that marriage is for keeps, then nothing does.

But this forces another issue to arise. “Okay,” you might say, “I can see that Jesus’ moral zeal led him to believe marriage was permanent and that sex only made sense within a context of rugged commitment to one another forever. I can see that. But where’s the love? It’s got to be more than just keeping the law.”

You’re right, and this is why we not only have to listen to Jesus in light of his historical context but also in light of his Bible.

The biggest problem with understanding sex today is that we don’t understand what love is. Here’s where we are headed: Love is not what we call romance, neither is it dopamine highs. Brain scientists will tell us right up front that both of those expressions are mostly chemical.

What then is love? Love is a rugged commitment to be with someone. “Being with” is what love is all about. And in a Christian context for someone who follows Jesus, love is being with someone as we both follow Jesus. The Bible sketches a wonderful view of love, and it’s one we need to listen to more carefully.

Israel’s story had one book that was devoted to this theme of rugged, committed love and marriage and sex, and it is a book that presents what can only be called a kingdom ideal of love, sex, and relationship: the Song of Solomon. This book, which is a series of beautiful, evocative, and erotic poems, shaped Jews to see that love and sex belonged together. This was in dramatic contrast to what they were finding in Greece and Rome at the time.

The Song of Solomon reveals two humans — a man and his wife—who are obsessed with one another in rapturous love, who playfully delight in one another’s presence and bodies, and whose words are so other-oriented and vulnerable that one must describe this book as Songs of Delight and Songs about Loving You.

It doesn’t take much imagination to know what these two lovebirds are saying to one another as they coo love poems to one another from Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) 4:16 – 5:1.

She

Awake, north wind,

and come, south wind!

Blow on my garden,

that its fragrance may spread abroad.

Let my beloved come into his garden

and taste its choice fruits.

He

I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride;

I have gathered my myrrh with my spice.

I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey;

I have drunk my wine and my milk.

Friends

Eat, friends, and drink;

drink your fill of love.

Or this from Song of Solomon 7:6 – 9, 10 – 12:

He

How beautiful you are and how pleasing,

my love, with your delights!

Your stature is like that of the palm,

and your breasts like clusters of fruit.

I said, “I will climb the palm tree;

I will take hold of its fruit.”

May your breasts be like clusters of grapes on the vine,

the fragrance of your breath like apples,

and your mouth like the best wine.

She

May the wine go straight to my beloved,

flowing gently over lips and teeth.

I belong to my beloved,

and his desire is for me.

Come, my beloved, let us go to the countryside,

let us spend the night in the villages.

Let us go early to the vineyards

to see if the vines have budded,

if their blossoms have opened,

and if the pomegranates are in bloom —

there I will give you my love.

In one of my college classes, after I read the last two chapters of the Song of Solomon in a dramatic fashion, one young man at the back of the room, with dopamine now at work in his system, uttered: “Man, am I glad this is in the Bible!”

The good news is that it is. The good news also is that it is designed to guide the sexual behaviors of humans. The Song of Solomon is ancient Israel’s “love and sex” manual. But there is one thing that shapes the dopamine delights of this most sacred of sex manuals: a committed relationship that expressed itself in being “with” one another. These two poets come alive in loving one another. In other words, the themes are shaped by chemically induced commitments that are found in the release of vasopressin and oxytocin: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

Sex is about relationship.

Sex is about love.

Without relationship and love, sex wounds.

Student after student tells me the same story, sometimes without even using words.

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From Scot McKnight's book below.