The Biblical Affirmation of Marriage and Sexuality

From its opening story about creation, the Bible affirms the institution of marriage and the joy of human sexuality. The Creator commands the first human beings, Adam and Eve, to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). And he regards their creation not only as “good,” along with all of the other creatures, but as “very good”—a kind of crowning achievement. And then, in the special story about how and why Eve was created from Adam’s rib, the institution of marriage is confirmed. “For this reason, a man leaves his father and his mother and is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). These words, moreover, are taken up by both Jesus (Matthew 19:5) and the Apostle Paul (Ephesians 5:31) in order to affirm the special role that marriage has within the biblical worldview as a symbol of the Creator’s own love for human beings. In this light, the affirmation of romantic love that we find in The Song of Solomon, as echoed in the title of this article (Song of Solomon 2:10), is a most natural and congenial expression.  

And yet, all was not well in the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve fell from their high station in God’s love through pride and vanity. Envy and jealousy spread to their children. Greed and lust darkened the world by the time of Noah. And God promised Abraham that his descendant, his “seed,” would lead the whole world forward to its restoration. Thus, when Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God, he gave a new, yet also an ancient standard for what would characterize the recovery of faithful marriage in the restored world.  

“You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” (Matthew 5:27-29)

So, Jesus set forth the call to single-minded faithfulness in marriage, including purity of thought and imagination, as the standard for the Kingdom of God which he was inaugurating. But how prepared are we today to follow Jesus along this way of imaginative purity and moral restoration? What would it mean to do so?

The Current Demoralization of American Culture

If we take Jesus’s standard of purity of thought and imagination as our guide, I think we will have to conclude that our culture in America today is thoroughly demoralized. Our movies, our television shows, our advertising and sporting events, and many other cultural venues are thoroughly riddled with stories and images that invite sexual fantasy, sexual adventurism, sexual self-invention, and promiscuity—a kind of roving sexual imagination rather than the disciplined and faithful one that Jesus calls us to embrace. But we are also like the proverbial frog sitting in a pan of water that has been slowly brought to boil. We are so inundated with sexual impurity and fragmentation, that we have grown used to it. We hardly notice it anymore.

For example, Deb and I were recently encouraged by some young Christian friends to watch the movie Game Night. Based on their recommendation, we were hoping for a good laugh and a witty plot. But then we found that a good deal of the humor in the movie depended on jokes about the earlier promiscuities and infidelities of the young married couples who people the story. For us, it really wasn’t funny at all, but a sad commentary on the demoralization of even the lighter fare in our culture’s cinematic offerings. Our young friends evidently had not noticed this when they recommended the movie to us. Had we also not noticed the crudity of the humor we would, I suppose, have sat for over an hour simply soaking in a screenwriter’s mindset that sees multiple sexual partners before marriage as nothing more than a good laugh.  

As members of the fallen human race, however, who have our own personal histories of sin and failure to account for, Deb and I don’t really believe that that is true. How much better might it be for young couples to marry each other out of a history of faithful purity, rather than thinking that it is only normal to take a detour through the self-indulgence and dissipation of promiscuity? Only the person who actually wears that shoe can tell us how it fits. Yet, we give thanks that, in Christ, we may also take back up his call to faithfulness in marriage and begin where we are to discover why he calls us to this kind of faithfulness, this purity of imagination.   

The Remoralization of Our Lives

If we are to recover the goal of fidelity in marriage as Jesus described it, including the experience of purity of imagination, what will be required of us? No doubt there are many ways to respond to this challenge that could be helpful. Any effort would be better than none, better than simply remaining numb and vulnerable to the simmering pot of our demoralized culture as it is. But let me make a more proactive effort by suggesting what I believe is a pivotal focus for this exercise: We need to develop criteria for the “worldview-criticism” of media, and thus for the personal selection of the movies, television shows, advertising, and other entertainment resources that we watch. In other words, on what basis can we evaluate the moral content of the media we watch? What will we allow ourselves to watch? What will we turn off at once as soon as we discern its demoralized condition?

One way to do this, I hope without becoming rulish or legalistic, is to use the analysis of worldviews. There are many ways of viewing the world, with many different and even contradictory implications. There is the biblical worldview, for example, which we saw in outline in the opening paragraphs of this essay. And then there is the modern deistic or “Epicurean” worldview, which is widely prevalent in our culture and media, and typically diverges from the biblical worldview at nearly every point. For purposes of comparison, according to Professor N. T. Wright, all worldviews can be analyzed in terms of how they answer five basic questions.[1]

1. Where are we?
2. Who are we?
3. What is wrong?
4. What is the solution?
5. What time is it?

For the biblical worldview, the answers are full of hope. We are 1) in God’s good creation, and we are 2) designed to embody the goodness of life (including marriage and sexuality), but 3) we have fallen into patterns of brokenness, idolatry, and rebellion that lead to harm and death (again, including in our sexual lives). So, 4) our Maker has not abandoned us, but sent his Son and Spirit to reset the pattern and foundation for faithful human life (including, again, our sexual life); and now, 5) we are in the midst of this restorative process, if we place our lives in the care of the risen Christ and his Spirit. In the Spirit and power of his faithful life, his defeat of sin and death in his own body, we are on our way to our own resurrection and to the restoration of creation itself. That, in outline, is the biblical worldview.  

But now, let us look at what I have called the “Epicurean” worldview, which is, I believe, one of the most prominent worldviews that we encounter in a great part of our contemporary media and entertainment. And please note, as we move through this brief analysis, we are engaging in the kind of worldview-criticism that can be applied to all other movies and media, whatever worldview they express.

For the Epicurean (or deistic) worldview, if there is a god or gods, he or they are not interested in or engaged in the events of our world. So, the world itself is 1) simply a flux of changing conditions and “atoms” in which 2) we humans exist merely as blips of consciousness with no future or purpose to reach beyond our immediate existence. In this kind of world, 3) there really is no problem that must be solved, unless it is simply to avoid any excess that might lead to pain; and 4) the solution is simply to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. Moreover, 5) since there is no life beyond death, no restoration of the world or the self to aspire to, we simply live in such a world for the present.

Let me ask you to try an experiment. The next movie or TV show you watch, try to observe the plot, the characters, and the storyline; and try to discern what kinds of answers to the five questions are either implied or made explicit in the story itself. How do the characters interact? What motives, aims, or goals do they have, if any? Is God, or prayer, or religious activity involved anywhere in their story? And what seems to be the underlying theme that the script brings into focus? Are the answers those of the biblical worldview? Is that the world in which the characters in the movie are living? Or are the answers more like the Epicurean, the deistic worldview? A world where all is in flux, where transcendent values are not even on the radar, and where one may as well follow the pleasure principle to get along in life as best one can, wherever that may lead?

My own experience with this kind of worldview analysis and criticism has been that a great portion of the movies and TV shows and other media that are released by our entertainment industry today embody and express, at best, the Epicurean worldview. This is not even to mention other worldviews that take a more Stoic or Eastern Buddhist approach, or still others in our post-modern context that become completely cynical, crass, and pornographic in their dystopian and hedonistic portrayal of what the world is really all about.

Applying these basic tools to the movie Game Night, in my estimation, it settles down comfortably within the demoralized simmer of the Epicurean worldview. It makes no effort to see the humor that could arise if the plot also included an awareness of higher values or the possibility of human redemption and restored life. Of course, these suggestions raise other questions that cannot be dealt with here. For example, what kind of humor, even bawdy humor, would still be at home within the biblical worldview? Also, how can a movie deal with sin and failure in a way that doesn’t trivialize it but rather shows the harm that comes to human life from unfaithfulness? I think the movie Doctor Zhivago achieves something along these lines in its portrayal of the heartache that comes to Zhivago and Lara, and others, as a result of their infidelity. The point here, however, is not to insist on my worldview analysis of selected films, but rather to suggest a method by which anyone can evaluate a wide range of media in order to engage more hopefully in the remoralization of our culture and of our own lives.

The Wider Cultural and Political Context

The importance of this effort toward the remoralization of faithful marriage and romance in our culture is not only about personal ethics. It is also about the recovery of moral conviction in the wider spheres of culture and politics. The forces of cultural revolution in America since at least the 1960s have been consistently committed to destroy the fabric of Christian marriage and personal morality in order to promote their own desired brands of social activism and revolution.[2] Consider, for example, the following litany, recorded at a gathering of radical feminists in the late 1960s.  

“Why are we here today?” she asked.

“To make revolution,” they answered.

“What kind of revolution?” she replied.

“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.

“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.

“By destroying the American family!” they answered.

“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.

“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.

“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.

“By taking away his power!”

“How do we do that?”

“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted. 

“How can we destroy monogamy?” . . .

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they shouted.[3]

The demoralization of marriage and sexuality that we find in popular movies and in other media today is not usually so brazen and antagonistic as this litany. If the heat were turned up that high all of the time, the frog would surely leap from the pan. But the simmering dilution of moral vision and conviction that slowly drains away our commitment to faithful marriage and purity of imagination is nonetheless pervasive in our mainstream media and entertainment.

Indeed, in my estimation, almost all of what now appears on mainstream TV or in the theaters is riddled with voyeurism and images of sexual adventurism. We must become sensitized once again to the difference between wholesome, beautiful, and healthy stories of romance and marriage, on the one hand, and the tawdry images of sexual confusion and harm that are spawned upon us in nearly everything that comes out of Hollywood or through the TV. As Christians interested in Jesus’s standard of imaginative purity, we should ask the Holy Spirit to sharpen our skills for sorting out the difference between the garbage of casual sexual adventurism and the high goal and calling of faithfulness in Christian marriage.

Jesus’s Standard Revisited

In this light, Jesus’s call to faithfulness in marriage, including purity of imagination, is not at all, as some today are proposing, a harmful relic of ancient religious tradition. Rather, Jesus’s standard for his Kingdom people is really about how we are made as human beings, and how we can be fulfilled in our sexual experience, rather than hopelessly isolated and at odds with each other. Indeed, when we bring Jesus’s standard together with what the Apostle Paul says about the meaning and practice of Christian marriage, we find that marriage itself is a symbol of God’s own servant love in Christ (Ephesians 5:21-33) and that husbands and wives fulfill this symbol by being good stewards both of their own minds and hearts as well as those of their spouses (1 Corinthians 7:1-6).

Might we hear the title of this essay, then, not only as a celebration of human love and marriage; but also as an echo of our Maker’s call to us where he has found us in the far country. And the remoralization of our personal lives and relationships will pay dividends not only within our families, but also within the wider cultural, political, and spiritual battle that is currently shaking the foundations of our country. “Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.” 

 

[1] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 1992) pp. 122-133. See also, by the same author, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1996) pp. 443-474.

[2] Yuri Bezmenov, former KGB agent who defected in the 1970s to Canada, gave public lectures in Canada and the U.S. on the communist strategy to overthrow the American government and society. The strategy consisted in four stages: 1.) demoralization (through such things as encouraging sexual decadence and undermining the rule of law), 2.) destabilization (through such things as stirring up strife and animosity between racial, gender, and other “factional” groups), 3.) Violent Revolution (by means of civil strife in the streets, riots, looting, and other criminal behavior) and 4.) Normalization (where the administrative state steps in to adopt “emergency” powers in order to quell the violence they have created). In this way, if all went according to plan, authoritarian power would be normalized.

[3] Paul Kengor, The Devil and Karl Marx (Tan Books: Gastonia, North Carolina, 2020) p. 366. This is taken from an interview with Mallory Millet, sister of Kate Millet who authored the book, Sexual Politics. Mallory was present in 1969 at Kate’s apartment for the performance of this litany.