Paul Walker, Sex and the City...of God

  

The title of this piece brings together two competing ideologies about sex. Sex and the City is of course HBO’s long running show about the erotic life of Sarah Jessica Parker and her thirty-something friends in Gotham City. In that show you find the culture’s attitudes about sex front and center. The City of God, on the other hand, is St. Augustine’s 4^th Century book about how Christians are to live in and yet be distinct from the world, sexually and otherwise.

As Christians, how are we to think about sex? How do we get from Sex and the City to The City of God? How do we get from I Am Charlotte Simmons to The Bible?

 

The first thing to say is that Christians value sex – even more than those from competing ideologies. Hedonists or Epicureans, for instance, only value the body. Bodily pleasure is the highest good in life. Hedonist use sex toward that end – and the pleasure is an end in itself. A version of this thinking places sex in the realm of biological bodily need – like eating or drinking. We are told we must obey and encourage our body’s sexual desires in order to be healthy people. This body only ideology is simply untrue.

Gnostics – or super spiritual types, on the other hand, disregard the body. They think that what they do with their bodies doesn’t matter – all that counts is their “spiritual life.” I think the modern version of this is “it’s ok to have sex as long as we love each other.”  This spirit only ideology is also untrue.

Christians, on the other hand, value the body and the spirit! Our God is a materialist! He become a body – “the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Christians, more than anybody, see that sex is good. I mean that objectively. God created sex, He created the body’s erogenous zones, He created pleasure, and He called it good. We are not prudes

 

We have nothing to be embarrassed about when talking about sex. God created it. As the senior devil Screwtape tells Wormwood, when dealing with any pleasure – specifically sexual pleasure, we are on the Enemy’s (God’s) territory. All the devils can do is pervert it or cause us to misuse it.

But for Christians, the meaning of sex goes beyond the body. Biblically speaking, when two people have sex they become “one flesh.” A unity is formed that includes but goes beyond the body, creating a deep spiritual and emotional bond between two people.

Deep down most people know this, or at least guess at this reality. A student in a Rolling Stone article said it this way. ''I think the ease of hooking up has, like, made people forget what they truly want,'' says Naomi. ''People assume that there are two very distinct elements in a relationship, one emotional and one sexual, and they pretend like there are clean lines between them.''

 

  When you “hook up” with someone, you become part of them - physically and symbolically. The clean lines are gone. This is an objective reality from God’s point of view. His standard is this: sexual intercourse is the act that creates a marriage bond. This means from God’s point of view, the people you’ve had sex with are your husbands and wives. With them you have become “one flesh” as the scripture says.

This is a sobering thought. As C.S. Lewis says, “the truth is that wherever 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." (The Screwtape Letters)

Christians value sex because God so values sex. He guards it for safekeeping within the covenant of marriage. There is where the one flesh connection flourishes and sexual pleasure – bodily and spiritually – burns brightly – like a hot roaring fire in a big fireplace.