Gospel sex?

I heard a new idea concerning sex last week. It is that God made sex to explain to us what a relationship with Him is about. According to that idea, God is the man, Christians are the woman, and sex is a symbol of our unity with Him.

If that was true, we could study the way females experience sex as an example of how we should think about unity with God.

For many women (and many men too, but this is not the topic right now), sex has to do with their most traumatic life experiences.  Even the cruder parts of popular culture admits that penetration is often not a good thing: It has expressions like “getting  ____ed” for getting cheated; and the common curse that parents teach their children never to use is literally a desire that the cursed person gets penetrated.

If we get, from that, a picture of how Christ want to relate to us, the picture is blasphemy.

Female lack of sexual experience is generally related to purity. This idea appears across most continents, eras, and religions.  In fact, some groups even genitally mutilate women, so that they can have no desire to lose their “purity.”

If girls are seen as losing purity by becoming sexually active, we really need another analogy for what Christ does when bringing us close – He takes us impure people and make us pure.

Sex is something not meant for children.

Kassian (the complementarian who wrote the sex-is-a-symbol-of –unity-with-Christ article) insist that “Without [marriage and sex]… we would have a tough time understanding the Gospel.” I know that children too young to understand marriage and sex understand the gospel very easily, and that many unmarried people do understand the gospel. On the other hand, I heard of nobody who ever testified that marrying or getting sexually active finally helped them to understand the Gospel.

Believing that sex is the main way people can understand the gospel, would lead to one of two ways of treating children: You could either get to the conclusion that the gospel is not meant for children, or that sex and marriage is meant for them. Seriously, both of those options are terrible.

…therefore a man shall leave his parents and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one…

The texts on man and woman becoming one (Gen 2:24; Mat 19:5; Mar 10:7; Eph 5:31) has the word “therefore” in them – connecting to the reason why it happen. And the therefore words never say: “To symbolize a relationship with God.” From 3 of the 4 passages, “symbolizing a relationship with God” is not even among the possible inferences.  (From the Ephesians text, it is theoretically possible to think the text implies such symbolism – as long as the reader does not connect the text to the other three texts on the topic.) This idea is not in  the Bible.

As if that was not bad enough, Kassian believes that sex also symbolizes our relationship with the church elders. It would seem to me the way to sexually symbolize unity with Christ and church elders would not be faithfulness to one partner. To symbolize that, you would need to sleep with A who represents Jesus and B who represent the church elders, but B also has to sleep with A…

By now, you probably guessed my verdict on “sex and marriage was meant to be symbols powerful enough to convey the gospel.” I find the idea hare-brained. But if it was true, unbelievers would have loved DVD’s with a symbolic gospel message.

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Note

I did mention to Kassian – in a comment on her post – why I find her idea to be neither Christian nor wise, but she did not publish it. I know several other Christians were also concerned about this teaching, and their comments were not published either. Instead, she chose to close down comments on the post.