Sex is, then, an important part of what Lewis calls the “great dance.” According to Lewis, all of God’s reality— from the stars and solar systems to the act of sexual intercourse—form an ongoing, dynamic dance, in which “plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed.” (9)

Sex Unifies: The Ceremony of Sex
Third, sex is sacred because it constitutes a covenant renewal ceremony. The original purpose of sex was to “become one flesh,” meaning a complete personal union. Sex creates deep intimacy, oneness, and communion between two people (Gen. 2:24; 4:14). In the Bible oneness is not simply a matter of emotion but is always the creation of a covenant. Romanticism considers emotional happiness to be the main condition for marriage; if there is interpersonal happiness, sex is warranted, and then comes marriage. But when love dies, it is also allowable to walk away from the marriage. In the biblical view, however, the main condition of marriage is a binding covenant. In the romantic view, sex is self-expression; in the biblical view, sex is self-giving.

The Bible is full of covenant renewal ceremonies. When God enters into a personal relationship with someone, he is not so unrealistic as to think that mere emotion can serve as the basis for it. He knows that human emotions come and go and that there needs to be something binding to provide consistency and endurance. So God requires a binding, public, legal covenant as the infrastructure for intimacy. It is far easier to be vulnerable to someone who has bindingly promised to be exclusively faithful to you than to someone who is under no obligation to stay with you for more than one night. Thus God demands covenants. But even that is not enough. He regularly gets his people together to reread the terms of the covenant, remember the history of his acts of grace in their lives, and recommit themselves through renewal of the covenant. The ultimate covenant renewal ceremony is the Lord’s Supper. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper renews the covenant made at baptism; through the breaking of bread and the pouring out of wine it reenacts the selfless sacrifice of Jesus to us. In addition, in the receiving and eating of the sacrament it reenacts the giving of ourselves to Jesus. We reenact the total commitment and oneness we have in Christ as a way of renewing and deepening that oneness.

In the same way, marriage is a covenant, one that creates a place of security for vulnerability. But though covenant is necessary for sex, sex is also necessary for covenant. The covenant will grow stale unless we continually revisit and reenact it. Sex is a covenant renewal ceremony for marriage, the physical reenactment of the inseparable oneness in all other areas—economic, legal, personal, psychological—created by the marriage covenant. Sex renews and revitalizes the marriage covenant.


SEX HAS BOUNDARIES

It’s easy for modern people to find the Christian view of sex to be repressive. To say this, however, is to make some unfounded assumptions. The teachings of Sigmund Freud focused on the conflict between an internal “id,” the innate sex drive, and an external “superego,” the socially formed conscience developed by our culture and upbringing. But this is not science; rather, it is borrowed from romanticism. How does Freud know the conscience to be a totally external, social artifice, separate from an innate, internal basis? He doesn’t, of course, but by setting up the conscience as an external influence and the sexual instinct as an internal influence, he can call all sexual ethics “repressive” and “artificial.” In actuality, evidence exists to prove that the sexual appetite is shaped significantly by the external forces of media, peer pressure, and cultural values.

Sex only works in the fullest way God intended for one man and one woman within the exclusive, permanent, legal commitment of marriage. Put another way: sex is a God-invented way to say to another person, “I belong completely and exclusively and permanently to you.” That cannot be said outside the permanent, exclusive covenantal commitment of marriage. The modern sexual revolution finds this rule so unrealistic as to be ludicrous, even harmful and psychologically unhealthy. Yet despite the incredulity of modern people, this has been the unquestioned, uniform view and law of not only one but all the Christian churches (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant) and of Jewish, Muslim, and most older pagan morality as well.

Today’s young adults take for granted that normal people will have sex if they are in a romantic relationship. Even those who speak of themselves as “conservative” or “traditional” simply mean they will not sleep with a boyfriend or girlfriend until later in the relationship. The Christian ethic of abstinence outside of marriage is considered at best laughably unrealistic, and at worst pathological and abnormal. Christians who profess the biblical sex ethic can expect to be met with incredulity, sarcasm, or hostility. Basically, the mainstream view is that adultery is wrong because it hurts a spouse but that there’s nothing wrong with sex between two loving, consenting unmarried adults. And as Christian leaders, we are finding this view to be widespread inside the Christian community as well. How do we respond?

The Pervasive Understanding of the Bible
It is rather typical to hear Christians say, “I know that the Ten Commandments forbid adultery, but the Bible doesn’t really forbid sex between two unmarried people.” The idea of premarital sex was so outrageous in ancient cultures, however, that it was simply assumed in many passages. For example, in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul wished more Christians would choose, as he has, a single life. He believed there were great advantages for singles in the work of the kingdom. “I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about . . . how he can please his wife” (1 Cor. 7:32–33). He wished more people were like him (1 Cor. 7:7, 26, 32) and stated, “It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:8–9). In other words, Paul simply assumed that a single person would be celibate. If you cannot stay celibate, he said, you should get married. There is not even a hint that a single person should be having sex. The idea that Jesus Christ, as a first-century Jew, could have thought that sex between unmarried people was permissible is historically laughable.

The Meaning of porneia
Still, we can be sympathetic to Christians who find it hard to cite chapter and verse against premarital sex. One of the problems involves the difficulty of translating the word porneia or pornos. In the older King James Version this word was usually translated “fornication,” but that word is archaic. Modern translations have rendered the word as “sexual immorality.” But that is too vague a term, as can be seen from 1 Corinthians 6:9 (“Neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers . . . will inherit the kingdom of God”) and Hebrews 13:4 (“Marriage should be honored . . . for God will judge the adulterer and all fornicators”).

We see in these and many other such references that fornication means something more than just adultery. The authors are clearly thinking of different kinds of sins, or they wouldn’t be distinguishing between these groups of persons in the lists. Nearly all commentators tell us that pornoi has reference to those who engage in sexual relationships outside of marriage. The word moichoi “denotes those who are unfaithful to the vows of commitment expressed in marriage.” (10) So porneia refers to any sex other than sex with your own spouse. In other words, while adultery is always fornication, fornication includes premarital sex as well as extramarital sex or adultery.

The biblical condemnation of “fornication” or sex outside of marriage is comprehensive. (11) Paul’s epistles contain so many reminders to Christians to abstain from premarital sex that it is obvious his readers lived in a culture similar to our own.

The Unity in the Unities
One of the ways some Christians try to mute the impact of biblical teaching is to point out that porneia is also translated (in some contexts) “harlotry” or “prostitution.” Therefore, it is occasionally maintained that “fornication” only means sex with prostitutes, not sex between two people who love one another. But Paul’s case study of sex with a prostitute in 1 Corinthians 6 is very instructive and disproves this reasoning: “Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, ‘The two will become one flesh’ ” (1 Cor. 6:17).

Clearly “one flesh” must mean something different here from mere physical insertion, or Paul would be reciting a mere tautology: “Don’t you know that when you have physical union with a prostitute you are having physical union with a prostitute?” So what does it mean? “‘One flesh’ . . . refers to the personal union of man with woman, woman with man, at all levels of their lives.” (12) To become “one flesh” means to become one new person— a new human unit. So when Paul used the word pornos about the case of sex with a prostitute, he cannot mean that one is automatically married in some kind of magical way. Rather, Paul is decrying the monstrosity of physical oneness without all the other kinds of oneness that every sex act should mirror. “Paul . . . here displays a psychological insight into human sexuality, which is altogether exceptional by first-century standards . . . he insists that it is an act which . . . engages and expresses the whole personality in such a way as to constitute an unique mode of self-disclosure and self-commitment.” (13)

In short, sex with a prostitute is wrong because every sex act is supposed to reflect an absolute and complete covenant unity. There must be no physical union unless there is also every other kind—a legal, economic, personal, emotional, and spiritual union. There must not be one unity without all the rest. Likewise, C.S. Lewis likened sex without marriage to tasting without swallowing and digesting. (14)

Worldview Analysis
When someone says, “Sex with a prostitute is wrong but not sex with someone you love,” we have the presupposition of a romanticist worldview. In this worldview, what makes sex right or wrong is whether it is an expression of sincere love, and therefore prostitution is wrong because it is done for money, not love.

But Paul has a very different presupposition. In his worldview, the purpose of sex is not personal self-expression (in order to be happy) but personal self-donation (in order to imitate God) as a witness to the gospel of the kingdom. He says what makes sex with a prostitute wrong is that sex always obligates you to complete giving of self. Sex without the giving of oneself is a monstrosity, akin to a body walking around without a head.

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