I’m blushing. I don’t write like this. I don’t like to talk like this in public. But when the public conversation is about a book and a movie that celebrates a kind of sexual expression, it is time to put a certain amount of shyness aside.
Before going further, I want to say that I know how people will view the response of Christians to this movie: Typical! Of course those prudish, old-fashioned nagging Evangelicals don’t like a movie about sex!
But while Christians are often vocal about what to boycott and what to ‘take a stand for’, we haven’t been the best about saying why. And in the few blogs I’ve skimmed from Christians, there is a lot of ‘Please just don’t go see it’ or ‘This is sin!’ talk going on.
So, this is my reluctant attempt to add to the dialogue by highlighting three things Christians affirm about sex, intimacy and our deepest longing:
1. Christians believe that the secret to better sex is not more erotic pleasure but more and truer intimacy. If you think that that the key to better sex is increased erotic pleasure, then any way of increasing erotic pleasure is something we should consider. This, by the way, has been the unstated presupposition of many Christian sex books, which are full of advice on how to spice up the marital bedroom. Christian readers have only paid attention to when to have sex– after you’re married!– and failed to recognize that these Christian sex-experts have the same faulty premise as a secular world: better sex comes from more pleasure.
But the Bible’s premise is actually quite different: better sex comes from more and truer intimacy. Sex is a physical enactment– the embodiment, if you will– of the one-ness between man and wife. (There is, of course, something to be said here about how the covenant of marriage is the only thing strong enough to protect and preserve the deep vulnerability that is necessary to develop intimacy.) As their lives have been made one and are becoming one– the ‘now and not yet’ of marriage– so sex becomes stronger and more meaningful.
2. Christians believe that all intimacy is the result of a mutual yielding, not one-side domination. When real intimacy and not raw erotic pleasure is the goal, you can never end up with abusive sex or sexual violence. The reason we detect contradictory voices in our culture– ‘Stop domestic violence!’ ‘End the subjugation of women’ and yet ‘I love “50 Shades”!’– is that we are thinking through the lens of pleasure and not intimacy.
Before Paul ever says a word about husbands and wives in his letter to the Ephesians, he admonishes us to submit to one another. Intimacy is the result of a mutual yielding. For two people to get close– friends, lovers, or even teammates and colleagues– each must give a little. Each must surrender a part of who they are for the sake of the other. This isn’t to be taken in a cold, contractual sense. It is the essence of self-giving love. The perfect picture of this is the Trinity, where personhood is not diminished but cherished as a result of mutual self-giving. A culture enamored with a picture of ‘love’ that looks like erotic pleasure from dominating or being dominated is one that has lost any sense of self-giving love.
3. Christians believe that sexuality awakens a thirst only spirituality can quench. Many of the Church Fathers linked the erotic language of the Song of Solomon to the church’s worship as the ‘bride of Christ’. (I know: you’re going to have to rethink your opposition to what you’ve dismissed as ‘all that Jesus is my boyfriend stuff’!) They saw baptism as a kind of wedding ceremony and the Eucharist as a kiss from Christ.
All this may sound strange, but they– and many Jewish rabbis before them– knew something we have forgotten: there is a link between sexuality and spirituality.
Actually, our culture is aware of this link as well, they’ve just inverted the relationship. See, for example, the popular song, ‘Take Me To Church’, which uses the language of spirituality to describe the experience of sexuality. It’s like Song of Solomon in reverse.
Here’s the point: sexuality awakens us to a deep thirst– the longing to be fully known and fully loved– which only spirituality can quench. This is why even before talking about mutual yielding, Paul the Apostle spoke of being filled with the Spirit. It is the Spirit of God who fills those who belong to Christ, who communicates to each believer their deep belovedness in Christ, and who reminds us how fully we are known and how deeply we are loved.
There are a whole lot of people whose thirst for intimacy has been awakened. They are more aware of a longing to be known and to be loved this weekend than perhaps at other times. Beyond boycotting a movie, Christians can be the ones who speak loudly and lovingly about the only place where we are fully known and fully loved: in Christ.