Women just get pregnant. No woman has control over it. Sex is bad. Nothing really happens, it is just bad.
This was my perspective at age seven. So when the 15-year-old girl at my church became pregnant, I couldn’t understand the controversy. “Women just become pregnant,” I told my mother.
“No, Todd, they don’t.”
So the girl did something bad, and she became – wait! Sex leads to pregnancy?!
That was when I learned about sex, and it carried a significantly negative connotation in my adolescent life. Sex was synonymous with “sin,” regardless of context.
Praise the Lord for PSYC 415, the TWU course on human sexuality taught by Dr. Chuck MacKnee, which exposes a dualistic teaching: the separation of the evil flesh from the good spirit. “Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish” (Galatians 5: 16-17).
This dichotomy was further fueled by hedonism that made pleasure the chief purpose of life. Hedonistic pleasure disregarded the sanctity of marriage, so personal pleasure was distanced from morality. And if sex is the highest form of human pleasure, all the more distance.
Herein lies the problem: this argument only considers the physical side of sex and completely neglects spirituality.
Let’s look at where things went wrong. God’s design of sex was personified in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve lived in perfect unity and blissful harmony. This harmony, though, was disrupted after the Fall as Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the Serpent – the original battle of the sexes. Suddenly, human existence was about serving oneself rather than serving the other.
Hedonistic or not, sex is based on a yearning for completeness and wholeness, similar to that of spirituality, because it exposes humans as incomplete creatures. Consider these parallelisms: sexuality desires pleasure, information and longevity; spirituality seeks happiness, truth and immortality. Both are preceded by incompleteness and lack of fulfillment; both lead to a transcendent experience of intense union through a state of receptiveness with another being.
Psychologist Robert Sternberg coined the “triangle” view of love: passion (physical arousal), intimacy (shared knowing) and commitment (the cognitive decision of the marriage covenant). When these three components are fused together, the link between sexuality and spirituality is undeniable. Two become one, and the divine is encountered.
The pressing matter, then, is to bring spirituality back into the conversation. We otherwise are left with an incomplete picture. Consider this thought by Dr. James B. Nelson: “Sexuality is who we are as body-selves who experience the emotional, cognitive, physical, and spiritual need for intimate communion, both creaturely and divine.” If only I heard this in my younger years.
