Reconstructiing Christian Sexual Ethics 03.1: How does marriage fit into all this?

Some people are going to ask, if virtuous sex can exist outside of marriage, and non-virtuous sex can exist inside of marriage, what's the point of marriage, then?

The question answers itself: the point of marriage is not sex. Anyone who gets married so they can have sex is, at best, being distracted from the dozens of other things that should be driving their decisions. But we all know this happens in purity culture. Our failure to teach how to subjugate our bodily desires (more on this later) has resulted in a lot of failed marriages. In an attempt to make marriage meet our man-made idea of the sacred, we have instead made it cheap.

But first, what even is marriage? We could be talking about several distinct things! If the Church chooses to be in the business of litigating what people should and should not do inside and outside a marriage, we need a clear definition. And if we're trying to argue from a Biblical perspective, it gets even more problematic.

• Are we talking about the legal structures?
• Those clearly didn't exist for much of the Old Testament period
• Are we talking about the religious ceremony?
• Are we then saying that people married in a civil ceremony, or in another religious tradition, aren't really married?
• Are we saying marriage is (gasp) a sacrament!? Evangelicals don't even have the language to participate in that argument!
  
• Actions like cohabitation, sex, having children?
• This implies that a lot of people are married without intending to be, which I would reject as a useful definition.
• The private commitment between two people?
• If this is what matters, why do we have ceremonies and paperwork?
• The public commitment between two people?

The public commitment seems to be the critical piece, with the legal and religious layers as additional covenants.

Now, there might be issues of Kindness, mercy, and generosity to keep in mind, but those are contextual, depending on your particular circumstances. In this virtue framework, the universal unique value of marriage is under Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship. Making and keeping covenants is a good, in itself.

Consider the story of the prophet Hosea.

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, he said to him, “Go marry a prostitute who will bear illegitimate children conceived through prostitution, because the nation continually commits spiritual prostitution by turning away from the Lord.”

God told Hosea to marry Gomer, to exemplify to the community how bad God's marriage to Israel was. Hosea was a prophet, not by words, but by action. This was an anti-marriage. Therefore, our marriages should be the opposite. We are to be a living prophecy, exemplifying the love of God for his people through love and sacrifice for each other. That is our holy calling. Making marriage about sex makes it less sacred, not more.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 03: Dating and Relationships

I grew up in the late nineties evangelical purity culture, though perhaps a less pernicious implementation than some I've heard of. If you don't know what I mean, here's the rundown:

• Men are uncontrollable lust machines
• A woman's sexual role is to satisfy her husband, having no sexual desire of her own 
• Sexual arousal is lust and therefore sinful
• Women are responsible for men's lust
• Women who engage in sex before marriage are permanently rendered less valuable as humans
• Everyone should suppress their sex drives until they get married, and then suddenly flip a switch and become healthy sexual beings
  
• If you follow these teachings, sex within marriage will be far better than otherwise
  

Not a bit of that is scriptural, of course. Seriously, find one place that backs any of that up. It's all teachings of man that are elevated to the level of scripture. And it's not even teachings that work. Numerous studies show that purity teachings have no statistical impact on the average number of sexual partners a person has, or the age of first sexual experience, and they tend to result in more accidental pregnancies and abortions. And these teachings result in tremendous sexual dysfunction and shame.

Many excellent books and podcasts exist for people recovering from these false teachings, and it is not my intention to add to them here. I will only say this: no good tree bears bad fruit. The tree of purity culture bears bad fruit. Cut it down and throw it into the fire.

Now, I have a much more pressing question: what should we be teaching instead? When I was growing up, I saw almost no discussion of what a Christian relationship, sexual or not, married or not, looks like. All we really got is "don't have sex until you're married." We've seen that the scriptural position on sex outside of marriage isn't as cut and dried as many of us have been taught.

So if this ground isn't solid, where do we have to stand? Do we default to the worldly ethic of enthusiastic consent, and say that God has no interest in our sex lives as long as we're not harming anyone? By no means! God clearly wants us to give him all aspects of our lives, including this one. But what does that look like?

I haven't seen much discussion of this. There's a lot of discussion of rejecting and recovering from purity culture, but not as much about what scripture-based ethics we build in its place. I am not claiming to have all the answers. But here's how I suggest working through this problem: start with the Christian virtues (the ten clusters we identified earlier, or some other list if you prefer), and see how they all interact with the domain of our lives that includes dating, relationships, marriage, and sex.

Keep in mind, this is not a list of rules. If you're trying to develop a list of rules, you're doing virtue ethics wrong. It's possible some general rules will fall out of it, but that's not the goal. The goal is to learn to think about the situations you might run into, so you have some idea what's virtuous and what's not. So here are our virtues, and my first-pass thoughts on how they apply in this domain:

• Humility before God: Serve God, and see that his ways are higher than your ways
• Consider how your religious beliefs and practices will interact with those of your partner
• Drive for righteousness and restorative justice: Make your life and the world more in line with God's will; mourn sin and repent
• Ask your partner to help you recognize sin and repent of it
  
• Help your partner recognize sin and repent of it
• Work together to make the world more just
  
• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth: Learn true things, reject false things, and spread that learning
• Do not lie to your partner
• Tell your partner all relevant truths; don't lie by omission
• Recognize and reject when your partner lies to you, or leaves out relevant truths
• Ask the important questions
• Love and respect: Place others before yourself
• Place your partner before yourself
• Recognize when your partner places themself before you
• Consider other people whose needs your actions might affect
• Your former and future partners
• Your family and friends and children
  
• Your partner's former and future partners 
• Your partner's family and friends and children
  
• Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude: Recognize the good God has given you
• Accept that you may not have the relationships you want, and find joy in the ones you have
  
• Accept that the relationships you have may not have all the qualities you want, and find joy in the positive qualities they have
  
• Accept that your partner may not do or be everything you want, and find joy in what you can
  
• Accept that your relationship will end, and find joy in the time you have
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship: Give up revenge, and encourage community
• Build a relationship with each other. Date! Spend time together, learn about each other, do new things together, read books, talk about ideas and dreams and fears
• Forgive each other, constantly
  
• Build relationships with each other's family and friends and faith communities
• Marriage and building a family are the ultimate expression of this, exemplifying God's abiding love for His people
  
• Patience and hope: Remember that God will act in time
• Do not rush or pressure your partner to advance your relationship
  
• Recognize and reject when your partner rushes or pressures you
  
• Encourage each other to enjoy whatever stage your relationship may be in
  
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity: Do good for people, especially those in need
• Do not cause your partner harm
  
• Recognize and reject when your partner causes you harm
• Recognize and reject when your partner causes others harm
• Do your partner good
• Recognize when your partner does good for you
• Recognize when your partner does good for others
• Help each other do good for others, together
  
• Integrity and self-control: Be one thing, all the time; subdue bodily impulses
• Recognize, acknowledge, and communicate about physical drives
  
• Help each other build self-control over those drives
  
• Faithfulness and endurance: Keep your covenants, carry on in the face of all adversity
• Don't break agreements of fidelity with your partner
  
• Don't spread secrets or lies about your partner
  
• Don't harm your partner after a relationship ends
  
• Help each other continue in all the virtues for as long as your relationship lasts
  

I don't see that any Christian would object to the above advice. That makes me think we're on the right track, that our process for understanding Christian ethical behavior with respect to relationships is valid.

 

Now, I'm going to go back over the virtues and point out places where they are specifically applicable to sex. In the below, I'm using "sex" as shorthand for "any physical or sexual interaction," because I can't really justify drawing an arbitrary line for where "sex" begins.

• Humility before God
• Consider whether your relationship ethic is compatible with that of your partner
• This requires that you know both your own relationship ethic and that of your partner; see Embrace of knowledge and truth
  
• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom and truth
• Both partners should understand how sex, pleasure, pregnancy, and sexual safety work in general
  
• Both partners should have all the important information about each other's sexual and emotional needs, desires, and history, including any applicable covenants
  
• Both the above are critical for Kindness and mercy; you cannot show your partner kindness without understanding their needs
  
• Love and respect
• Consider your partner's sexual and emotional needs as more important than your own
• Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude
• Most sexual relationships will not meet 100% of both parties' desires. This is normal. Be okay with that.
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• Sex should build relationship with your partner through shared intimacy, vulnerability, and pleasure
  
• Patience and hope
• Do not pressure your partner to advance the sexual intimacy of the relationship, or for existing levels of intimacy at an unwelcome time
  
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
• Use sex for mutual pleasure and comfort
• Ensure the physical safety of sex
• Remember your partner's emotional needs
• Consider anyone you or your partner have covenant relationships with who could be harmed
  
• All this requires Embrace of knowledge and truth, to know what can cause harm
  
• Integrity and self-control
• Make your sexual actions match your inner goals and statements of purpose
  
• Do not let bodily sexual impulses control you
• Faithfulness and endurance
  
• Keep covenants of sexual fidelity within a relationship
• Do not spread intimate information during a relationship, or after a relationship ends
  

Once again, I don't expect that any Christian would find the above objectionable. At worst, it's incomplete in some fashion. But we are at least forming the basis for a more comprehensive teaching on relationships and sex, in whatever context.

Now, again working from the virtues, are there times when a couple should not have sex (of any kind)? Again, this is not a list of rules. But there do seem to be times when a person should clearly not engage in sex, because it cannot be virtuous in the context we usually find ourselves in. I see only four definite ones:

• If you won't put your partner's needs above your own, don't have sex with them
• Enthusiastic consent is a requirement
  
• Are there cases where sex with enthusiastic consent can still fail to consider a partner's needs? Absolutely. Enthusiastic consent is not sufficient unto itself.
• Also, if your partner won't put your needs above theirs, you are in danger; just run
• If you don't know how to have sex safely, don't do it
• Safe sex and informed consent are requirements
  
• If you don't know your specific partner well enough to understand their physical or emotional needs with regards to sex, you could very well harm them without intending to
• If you have an existing covenant of fidelity or chastity, don't break it
• No cheating is a requirement
  
• If having sex is not consistent with your personal integrity and exercise of self-control, don't do it

These are our bare minimum Christian ethic for sexual relationships. They include the world's minimum ethic, plus some additional demands on us. That's what we would expect to find, I think.

 

Now, how does all the above interact with the idea of marriage? Is it possible to build all of these virtues within in unmarried sexual relationship, in exactly the same way as within a marriage? There have certainly been points in history where that was not possible; in the hardcore patriarchy of the Old Testament, sex with an unmarried woman could ruin her entire life. It would lack the virtues of Love and respect, of Kindness and mercy. But in our cultural context? Within this framework, there is no obvious reason why sex outside of marriage is, in itself, unvirtuous.

 

Further, is it possible for sex within a marriage to not build these virtues, and thereby be less pleasing to God? Absolutely! Not all sex within marriage is God-honoring, by any means! Sexual ethics within marriage go well beyond "Keep sex within marriage" and we fail when we don't teach that. With a near-exclusive focus on premarital chastity, evangelicals lack any teachings about what ethical sex looks like, inside or outside a marriage.

So does God intend for sex to be universally reserved for marriage? Whether we take a mistaken rule-based legalistic approach to scripture, or this virtue-based approach, no such requirement is apparent. If it's anywhere, it's got to be in a virtue I've missed in my framework. Chastity is certainly a virtue that's been included in a lot of lists, but I wasn't able to find it in scripture the way I looked at it.

But importantly, by taking this scripture-based, virtue-oriented approach to sexual and relationship ethics, we have found a path to a Christian sexual ethic that requires more of us than the bare minimum. We are not just reducing our ethics to that of the world. Christ demands more of us.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.5: Covenants and How to End Them

The Church has dramatically altered its teachings on divorce in the last century. The Church has, at times, taught that divorce is only allowable in situations of sexual unfaithfulness. This position is based on some of the words of Jesus, which is a far better foundation than some Church teachings we've talked about on this blog. In recent decades, some churches have loosened this teaching to allow for divorce in cases of abuse or desertion.

It is not presently my intent to re-litigate those changes. Instead, I will consider divorce as one instance of the larger phenomenon of ending a covenant. By understanding the end of covenants more generally from a perspective of Christian virtue ethics, we may also hope to learn about divorce in particular.

Mortals, by definition, eventually die. All covenants involving mortals must therefore end. Those ends can fall into three categories. I'll use the language of covenants with two parties, but the same principles apply to multi-party contracts without loss of generality.

• Covenants can end naturally
• Covenants can end bilaterally
• Covenants can end unilaterally

Creating covenants builds the virtue of Peacemaking and building relationship. Keeping covenants builds the virtue of Faithfulness and Endurance. A covenant ending naturally or bilaterally can perhaps be virtue-neutral on both scores. But a covenant ending unilaterally, being broken, is virtue-negative. That means to be the moral choice, breaking a covenant would have to be virtue-positive along other directions. Either the covenant itself is virtue-negative, or the covenant is preventing actions that are virtue-positive.

Here are some thoughts about situations in which keeping a covenant might be less virtuous than breaking it:

• Humility before God 
• Your covenant is incompatible with your service to God in some fashion. If you have a covenant to serve in one religion, then convert, for example.
  
• Drive for righteousness and justice
  
• Your covenant makes your life less like God wants it to look.
  
• Your covenant makes the world less just, less like what God wants it to look like.
• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth
  
• Your covenant was made in ignorance, was rashly considered, or you were deceived.
  
• Love and respect 
• Your covenant requires you to place your needs before those of others.
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• Your covenant damages relationship and community, or prevents more valuable relationship and community from being formed.
  
• Patience and hope
  
• Your covenant was made under inappropriate pressure.
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
  
• Your covenant causes harm to others, or prevents good being done for them.
  
• Faithfulness and endurance
  
• You have conflicting covenants.

I don't see any way that the virtues of Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude; Integrity and self-control; or Endurance might justify breaking a covenant. But I may just be missing something.

So back to our first paragraph, where does divorce fit into this? If we reject the legalistic idea of Jesus giving us some list of check-boxes, and instead work from the virtues Jesus taught us, when might divorce imaginably be net virtue-positive?

• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth
  
• Your marriage was made in ignorance, was rashly considered, or you were deceived.
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• Your marriage prevents a more valuable relationship from being formed. An example might be when children are involved, one parent has abandoned them, and the other parent chooses to remarry.
  
• Patience and hope
  
• Your marriage was made under inappropriate pressure.
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
  
• Your marriage causes harm to others, or prevents good being done for them. This might be the case in a situation of abuse, for example.
• Keep in mind that among its many other problems, allowing your spouse to abuse you without push-back is unkind to your spouse, not to mention literally everyone else in their lives they may also abuse.
  

Interestingly, sexual unfaithfulness doesn't seem to have a place in this virtue scheme! The one time the Church has traditionally taught divorce to be allowable seems to be virtue-negative in at least some cases. As we often saw in the gospels, living like Christ may actually place higher demands on us than following the legalists. God has infinite faithfulness, even when we break our end of the covenant.

Now, what about bilateral divorces or other covenant-endings? There's less faithlessness involved at that point, so the details of the particular circumstance would need to be evaluated to determine whether such a situation was virtue-positive or negative. I see no reason that a bilateral divorce would necessarily be either. Still, since creating and keeping covenants is generally virtuous, covenants should only end with deep consideration. Since marriage is a living prophecy, exemplifying the love of God for His people, it should perhaps only be terminated if it cannot fulfill that function. But then, the number of people with good marriages who want divorces is presumably vanishingly small.

 

We can also apply some of this reasoning to non-marriage relationships. As relationships progress in stages of deepening commitment, the ability to end those relationships becomes more limited, almost by definition. What if one partner gets a job offer somewhere else? Or if one partner becomes unwell? How the partners react is dependent on their level of commitment. This is why a person should be slow and deliberate about progressing through relationship stages; that which is hard to undo should be hard to do.

 

Part of developing a relationship ethic should include some thought about the conditions when relationships end, with discussion of those circumstances between the partners before the end is suddenly upon them. We should never take ending a covenant before its time to be a casual thing.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.4: What's Love?

I heard a fascinating TED Talk podcast a while back, describing how thoughts of love actually manifest in the human brain. It turns out there are three completely separate systems that have almost nothing to do with each other.

• Sexual desire. This part of your brain makes you want to have babies.
• Romance. This part of your brain picks one person and makes you emphasize their positive qualities while overlooking their flaws. (In other words, this part of your brain lies to the rest of your brain.) It wants you to pick one person to have babies with.
• Attachment. This part of your brain makes you stay with the people you're most familiar with. It wants you to stick around and raise the babies.
  

Most people are going to feel all three of these at different points in their lives, for different people, in varying intensities on different days. This is perfectly normal.

But where does love enter into that picture?

American culture (and presumably many others) have this story we tell ourselves, about being in love. People who are in love have some certain high level of feelings for each other. It's difficult to quantify, so we need songs and poets and movies and about half of extant media to talk about it. It's clearly very important to us.

But it's difficult to quantify specifically because there's no in love button in your brain. Being in love, as we often use the term, is not an objective phenomenon. It's a story our culture tells, and sometimes it's a story we choose to tell about ourselves. This does not make being in love fake, or wrong, or unreal. Sometimes real things only exist subjectively, and that's okay! But it does mean that we can't use being "in love" as a standard of behavior, because it's different for every person, every couple.

Remember, when we're talking about love in this virtue context, we're not talking about anything romantic or sexual. We're talking about the willingness to put someone else's needs before your own. As we'll discus soon, that kind of love isn't something you grow into, or a finish line beyond which some levels of intimacy are hidden. This love is fundamentally necessary for any virtuous, functioning relationship.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.3: Relationship Ethics

As we discussed previously, it's impossible to grow in integrity and self-control without self-imposed boundaries on your actions. A subset of this is your actions within relationships, including sex. These boundaries are your relationship ethic.

Your relationship ethic defines many things, and your sexual behavior is not the most important of them, by any means. But it does include the set of circumstances where you consider it acceptable to engage in sexual activity of various kinds. The overlap between your relationship ethic and that of your (potential) partner is the set of circumstances where you can have sex, or indeed engage in any mutual behavior, and both behave ethically.

Some people already have well-thought-out boundaries for their own activities. Others have vague ideas they've never really thought through. Some (particularly the young) have literally never considered the idea.

So what does a relationship ethic look like? Consider each possible mutual activity you could perform with a partner. Include sexual activities, but also things we don't usually consider sexual like kissing or hand-holding or cuddling, or like cohabitation or joint bank accounts or lending money, or maybe something really important like attending church together. It's a very big list!

Now, for each activity, think about how a relationship might progress in stages towards that activity. Consider how the virtues we've been discussing would apply to that activity, and how they all interrelate. I'll list them below, with some suggested thoughts. This is by no means a complete list! It is a starting point for conversation.

• Humility before God
• At what point in a relationship do you start comparing your beliefs and practices and relationship ethic with those of your partner? Is this conversation zero for you? A few dates in? How many stages does this go in?
  
• If you have some specific milestones in mind, you definitely need to start this discussion before hitting one, or you risk disappointment somewhere.
  
• Embrace of knowledge and truth
• At what points in a relationship do you exchange which information about emotional and sexual needs, desires, and history? How many stages does this go in?
  
• This would require that both parties have some understanding of their own needs, desires, and history.
  
• You should be familiar with general anatomy, physiology, and safe sex practices long before entering any relationship where it might matter.
  
• Love and respect
• Love and respect needs to be present from day one, all the time, but there are certainly degrees of self-sacrifice. There's a difference between the kind of love that drops personal plans one day to help with an emergency, and the kind of love that will gladly do that every single day for the rest of time. What stages do you think exist?
  
• Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude
• You may have expectations and goals for a relationship. Your relationship may not meet all those expectations. If it doesn't, how willing and able are you to be content with that? At what point do you terminate the relationship rather than continue?
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• What levels of covenant could exist between you and your partner? How do you progress through them?
  
• Patience and hope
• Do all these stages of a relationship have a natural progression and definite end-goal? What is the minimum time you will stay at a particular stage? What is the maximum time? What happens if the maximum time is exceeded? Is age a factor in this progression?
  
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
• What degrees of kindness, pleasure and comfort can two people give each other? At what stage of a relationship should they apply?
• This definitely includes physical contact and sex in all its variety, but also includes things like lending money, running errands, and providing medical care.
  
• Integrity and self-control
• Do you engage in self-control practices particular to each stage of the relationship? Or particular to each transition? 
• Faithfulness and endurance
  
• What other covenants are each of you bound by? How do each of you interact with each other's covenants at each stage of the relationship?
• Think obligations to parents, existing children, mortgages, military service...
  

You might think there are three stages to any relationship. You might think there are fifty. You might think sexual intimacy progresses gradually along with everything else, or you might think it comes only with a degree of long-term or permanent covenant commitment. I'm not sure there are any objectively right answers here.

Whatever stages you come up with, plan to progress through them slowly and deliberately. Don't skip stages just to "get XX over with." The actions must flow from the relationship, not the relationship from the desired actions. Particularly consider including regular periods of abstinence (from whatever, not just sex) throughout, especially before progressing to a new stage. Maybe that will be stressful, but if not kissing for two weeks means your relationship is over, well, it's a good thing you didn't go further than that.

I can't tell you what kind of ethic to have. But have one. Define some principles, so you can hold to them, and thereby grow in self-control.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.2: Integrity and Self-Control

I want to spend some time focusing on one of the Christian virtue clusters we identified earlier. I labeled it as Integrity and self-control. Part of this cluster is purity, a very common word in the New Testament. We've often read this as being sexual purity, but there's no indication of that from the text. This makes more sense as the virtue of being only one thing, of consistency between your beliefs and actions. Hypocrisy would be opposed to this virtue.

The virtue of Integrity and self-control is only meaningful if there are boundaries on your actions that you choose to stay within. We build this virtue by acting in a fashion consistent with our statements of what is right and best, a fashion consistent with our ethics.

But where do we get such ethics? Since we reject legalism, are the other virtues the only source? No! We can create boundaries for ourselves. By living within those boundaries, and by constantly pushing ourselves to do better, we can develop the strength of character needed to resist temptation.

For example, I love cake. My wife's gluten-free lemon curd cake is one of the best things on the face of the earth. There's usually nothing morally wrong with me eating that cake, but circumstances are imaginable when it might be unkind or unloving for me to eat it. But it's such good cake! I might not have the strength of character to resist it!

The perfected me, the Christ-like me, would be able to resist that cake, perfectly, every day, forever. The me of today needs exercise to become the me that can resist temptation. So we put limits on our behavior to build the virtue of self-control, not to avoid sinful or unvirtuous actions today, but so we can become the kind of people who can avoid them in the future.

All this means that your self-created ethical boundaries must exist before the action that might challenge them. That means planning ahead for what situations you expect to put yourself in, and creating some idea of what limits you want to place on your own behavior. Think of it like an exercise plan; if you don't have goals, you can't achieve anything. And like an exercise plan, if you fail, you get back up and try again. Shame does not help.

But what if your goals are wrong? What if you create an ethic, and it just isn't working for you? Your circumstances have changed, you've changed, it's too easy, or you're constantly failing. You can't possibly be stuck with the same ethic you came up with thirty years ago, with no possibility of alteration. You need a means of amending your ethic, without abandoning it. You need a defined process for doing that. But you also can't just change your ethic too rapidly, or it may as well not exist.

My suggestion is, don't do any of this work alone. Find someone you trust to work through it with you. I would suggest someone disconnected from your personal life, perhaps a faith leader of some kind. Someone who won't be as easily swayed by your personal emotional reactions, and someone whose advice you respect and will voluntarily follow. Any change in your ethic should take at least a week, perhaps several weeks. In the meantime, not violating your prior ethic builds self-control.

A subset of all this is, of course, relationships and sex. In order to build the virtue of integrity and self-control within our relationships, we need to purposefully limit our behavior, and develop a relationship ethic. We'll talk about those in more detail later.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.1: On Impurity and Lust

At this point you might ask, "what about purity?" The New Testament mentions purity and impurity all the time, using multiple words. Purity's clearly very important in the Christian life. So what's so wrong with purity culture, then?

The problem is, there's no reason at all to assign a sexual meaning to the word "purity." This article dissects the idea far better than I can, and they summarize it thusly: “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Purity is part of the virtue I called integrity and self-control. Purity not a sexual concept at all, except insofar as sexual desires and actions can cause us to behave in an impure, double-minded manner, without control over our impulses.

Lust perhaps also does not mean what you think it means. The word translated "lust," epithumeō, is not sexual at all. It's "to set one's heart on a thing, desire, covet." The exact same word is used in numerous non-sexual contexts, and even in contexts where it's a good thing to do! For a few examples:

• Psalm 119:40 and Isaiah 26:9 describe "lust" for the will of God
  
• 1 Kings 11:37 is God saying he will give Jeroboam what he "lusts" for
  

The entire idea that this is a sin of sexual arousal, instead of a a perversion of desire itself, is a deep misunderstanding. In the Ten Commandments:

• You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that belongs to your neighbor.
• You must not desire another man's wife, nor should you crave his house, his field, his male and female servants, his ox, his donkey, or anything else he owns.

To covet your neighbor's belongings means you do not Love and respect your neighbor as yourself. The action of coveting flows out of the lack of this virtue.

In Matthew 5:28 Jesus talks about this word. There are numerous translation variants, one of which is very important to understanding this verse. Here's the New English Translation, emphasis mine:

But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

A lot of translations just say "with lust" or "lustfully." But it's about the intent to desire. Jesus isn't saying sexual arousal is bad, so we legalists can say "Look, a checkbox!" He's saying that a person who goes out of his way to look at a woman that he wants and shouldn't have is already broken inside, no matter whether he acts on his desires or not. This is not a faithful person, nor is it a person satisfied with what God has given him.

A huge amount of purity culture teaching derives from this one verse. "Women have to protect men from the sin of lust by covering themselves up!" But as legalists so often do, this totally inverts the point Jesus was trying to make. The problem isn't with the woman, because the problem was never with action at all. The sin that needs to be healed is inside the man, and will be even if he never sees that woman again. A perfectly virtuous, perfectly Christ-like married man would have no desire to look at a woman so he can imagine possessing her.

Of course, there's another problem here: one does not possess a person. A Christian with the virtue of Love and respect treats other humans as beings to relate to, as peers. To covet a person implies that you view a person the same way you view an object, as a means to your own ends. Once again, this flows out of a lack of the virtue of Love and respect for your fellow human.

Sexual arousal for another person is not a sinful lust, in itself. And a desire to have relationship with a person, even if that desire includes a sexual component, is not a sinful lust, in itself. The sin lies inside you, in the part of you that looks at humans as objects, wants to break covenants, and is unsatisfied with the gifts of God.

Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02: A Survey of Porn(eia) in the Bible

The standard conservative Christian sexual ethic is simple: only have sex with your spouse. There are a few complicating issues, including divorce, sexual orientation, and what actually qualifies as sex, but we'll save those for other times. "Sex only within marriage" is the basic paradigm.

Now here's my question: where does this come from in scripture? Because I've been told it's there all my life, and yet I'm not sure I can find it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I reviewed a lot of the "sin lists" of the New Testament. The word porneia shows up in basically all of them, which is a Greek word that's historically been translated as  fornication. So the argument goes that fornication is listed as a sin pretty much everywhere anything is listed as a sin, and fornication means "sex outside of marriage." QED.

Except that we are placing a lot of faith in our understanding of the word fornication and its correctness as a translational choice. Every scholarly source I find translates porneia as "sexual immorality," which is also the wording used in most modern Bible translations. Porneia a very broad term, and basically means "whatever sex the writer disapproves of."

So with this understanding, we're left with a new question: what sexual actions are immoral? There are a few obvious things, like adultery, or sex as part of pagan worship. But what about other things, like sex outside of marriage, or a variety of non-intercourse sexual acts? There's not exactly an exhaustive list anywhere in the New Testament, which should surprise nobody, because that would be legalism. But if we're living in a virtue framework, we need to have some understanding of this word. Porneia, whatever it means, has to contradict our virtue framework, or our framework is incomplete. 

I decided to review every instance of porneia in the New Testament and the Septuagint, including all the roots and variations I could identify.

• Porneia, sexual immorality, or metaphorically, worship of idols
  
• Porneuo, to commit porneia
• Porne/pornos, a person who commits porneia

(Interestingly, all these are derived from the root pirprasko, meaning "to sell into slavery." Make of that what you will.)

It's not really practical to explore every Old Testament use and variant of the word here, but it's easy to summarize. The word shows up dozens of times, and in the majority of cases it's a clear and obvious metaphor for faithlessness to God. In all the cases where it's used to describe actual people, it seems to be about a woman exchanging sex for money (or being treated like such), with adultery being rolled into that concept. And of course, we have Hosea, whose marriage revolved around both the literal and the metaphorical versions of this. Here are some notable references with a few comments:

• Dinah
  
• Tamar
• Leviticus 21
  
• Deuteronomy 22
• Note that there's no command anywhere to kill prostitutes, or even to punish them in any way. The trigger for punishment here is not sex outside of marriage, it's deception and financial damage.
• Also, side note about this passage, which, yes, is the one where it's okay to murder your wife if you find she's not a virgin. This gets a lot of play as one of the worst parts of the Law. But look at this from an implementation standpoint. Here's the scenario: a man marries a woman, then decides to accuse her of not being a virgin, true or false, in order to get rid of her. There's this assumption that her parents have kept the sheets from the wedding night, and that a virgin's sheets will have blood on them, while a non-virgin's sheets will not. (This is, of course, not how anything actually works.) But consider the chain of custody on that evidence: the parents are the ones holding the sheets! If there's no blood, they can fake it, save their daughter's life, and get a pile of cash! And everyone involved has to know this! In practical reality, this rule amounts to "Don't try to get rid of a wife by making false accusations against her. It'll just cost you a lot of money."
  
• Deuteronomy 23
• 23:2, no child of a prostitute shall enter the assembly of the LORD.
• This is in context with eunuchs and foreigners. This could be about children of religious unfaithfulness, rather than prostitution.
• Especially note that Judges 11:1 references Jephthah being the son of a prostitute.
  
• 23:17, there cannot be sacred cult prostitutes.
  
• Rahab
  
• Judges 16:1
  
• 1 Kings 3:16
• Notably, two prostitutes go to the king with a dispute, meaning they know Solomon isn't going to punish them for prostitution.
• This also implies that Solomon isn't exactly running a huge and complex bureaucracy with judges that would handle minor disputes like this.
  
• Proverbs 6:26
  
• Proverbs 29:3
  
• Amos 7:17
  

So we've seen that the porn words in the Septuagint are about adultery/prostitution, not about extra-marital sex in general. The Septuagint was the scripture that most Jews would have been familiar with when the New Testament was being written, so this is an important data point in understanding the use of the word by the New Testament authors.

How about the New Testament? There are a lot of uses with little context, where it just shows up in a list of other sins and no explanation. There are also a number of references where it clearly means prostitution, either literal or metaphorical. Here's a list of those, with minimal commentary by me:

• Matthew 15:19
• Matthew 21:31-32
• Literal prostitutes
  
• Mark 7:21
• Luke 15:30
• Literal prostitutes
  
• John 8:41
• This may be related to verse 48, when Jesus' opponents imply they think he's a Samaritan. The Judeans of the day would have considered Samaritans to be apostates, whose deformed version of Judaism was born out of mixing real Judaism with pagan religions, while the "real" Jews were busy being exiled to Babylon. Either way, it's about prostitution.
• Alternately, this may just be a dig at Jesus and his parentage. ("Yeah, well, your mother's a whore.")
• 1 Corinthians 5:9-11
• 1 Corinthians 10:8 
• Clear reference to prostitution as a metaphor for apostasy
  
• 2 Corinthians 12:21
• Galatians 5:19
• Ephesians 5:3-5
• Colossians 3:5
• 1 Timothy 1:10
  
• Hebrews 11:31, James 2:25
• References to Rahab, a literal prostitute
• Hebrews 12:16
• And see to it that no one becomes a pornos or godless person like Esau, who sold his own birthright for a single meal.
  
• This could be translated that Esau was a pornos because he sold his birthright for a bowl of stew. ("Esau was a total stew-whore.") If that's the translation, the sexual reference has to be a metaphor, unless Esau had a very strange relationship with stew. Alternately, since the Greek here lacks punctuation, this could be just a sin-list reference with no context.
  
• Numerous uses in Revelation, all clearly the prostitution/apostasy metaphor, except Revelation 22:15, which is a sin list.
  

So suppose we're trying to make the traditionalist argument, that porneia in the New Testament means "any sex outside of marriage." We have to argue that the New Testament authors meant that. We've already seen that the word porneia meant literal or metaphorical adultery/prostitution in the scriptures the New Testament authors would have been referencing. And the references above are no help in making an argument for a changed understanding of the word. There's only a few references left! I'll start with the easy ones.

• Matthew 5:32/Matthew 19:9
• Whoever divorces his wife, except for porneia, makes her commit adultery. Whoever divorces his wife, except for porneia, and marries another commits adultery.
  
• Jesus could mean literal adultery/prostitution, or perhaps religious apostasy. The Old Testament understanding of porneia as adultery/prostitution remains a reasonable interpretation.
  
• Acts 15:20, Acts 15:29, Acts 21:25
  
• The Jerusalem Council tells Gentile Christians that they don't need to keep the Jewish law, but only need to avoid four things:
• Food polluted by idols
• Things strangled
• Blood
• Porneia
• The first three are pretty clearly references to pagan worship practices. It's reasonable to suppose the fourth is as well. The Old Testament understanding of porneia as adultery/prostitution remains a reasonable interpretation, either as in "don't go whoring after other gods" or as in "don't have sex during pagan worship rites."
• It's also notable that the leaders in Jerusalem don't (as far as we're told) provide a list of what is and is not porneia. They seem to expect their audience to understand without further explanation.
• 1 Corinthians 5:1
• It is actually reported that porneia exists among you, the kind of immorality that is not permitted even among the Gentiles, so that someone is cohabiting with his father’s wife.
  
• A man with his father's wife is a specific type of porneia that Paul finds particularly bothersome. If the man or his lover are still married, the Old Testament porneia as literal/metaphorical adultery/prostitution remains reasonable.
  
•  Hebrews 13:4
• Marriage must be honored among all and the marriage bed kept undefiled, for God will judge pornos and adulterers.
• The Old Testament porneia as literal/metaphorical adultery/prostitution remains reasonable.

We are now left with exactly three passages from which one can make the traditionalist argument about the meaning of porneia. Here they are:

• 1 Corinthians 7:1-5
• Now with regard to the issues you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”  But because of porneiav, each man should have relations with his own wife and each woman with her own husband. A husband should give to his wife her sexual rights, and likewise a wife to her husband. It is not the wife who has the rights to her own body, but the husband. In the same way, it is not the husband who has the rights to his own body, but the wife. Do not deprive each other, except by mutual agreement for a specified time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then resume your relationship, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 

This is a case where older translations handle the ambiguities of Greek differently. The NET inserts quotation marks (with justification in the extensive footnotes), and things make much more sense. So Paul says that, rather than abstaining from sex entirely as the Corinthians suggested, and to avoid engaging in porneia due to lack of self-control, married couples should have sex. The Old Testament porneia as literal/metaphorical adultery/prostitution remains reasonable.

• 1 Corinthians 6:12-20
• “All things are lawful for me” – but not everything is beneficial. “All things are lawful for me” – but I will not be controlled by anything. “Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both.” The body is not for porneia, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. Now God indeed raised the Lord and he will raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I take the members of Christ and make them members of a pornhv? Never! Or do you not know that anyone who is united with a pornh is one body with her? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But the one united with the Lord is one spirit with him. Flee porneia! “Every sin a person commits is outside of the body” – but the porneuwn sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body. 

This is often pointed to as the scripture about sex outside of marriage, with those two porneias translated as fornication. But the entire passage is much more coherent if we translate that as prostitution as it was in the Old Testament. It becomes a passage with a single subject, instead of jumping back and forth between prostitution and pre-marital sex as if the two are equivalent.

More on this later.

We are left with one passage, possibly the most interesting one of all. I've inserted some gender-neutral language into my usual NET, since the translational consensus seems to be that such carries the intent better.

• 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8
• Finally then, brothers and sisters,  we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received instruction from us about how  you must live and please God (as you are in fact living)  that you do so more and more. For you know what commands we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is God’s will: that you become holy, that you keep away from porneia, that each of you know how to possess his own body in holiness and honor, not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God. In this matter no one should violate the rights of [a fellow Christian] or take advantage of him[/her], because the Lord is the avenger in all these cases, as we also told you earlier and warned you solemnly. For God did not call us to impurity but in holiness. Consequently the one who rejects this is not rejecting human authority but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you. 

Consider the context of this writing. First Thessalonians is very possibly Paul's first letter, to his first Church. It's five chapters long. Chapters 1-3 are Paul recounting his history with them, and what's happened since he left them, and how proud he is of them. Chapter 4 is this bit about porneia, an exortation to even more brotherly love than they already have for each other, and then some words about the coming Resurrection to comfort them about their comrades who have died, and remind them of how it will come by surprise. Then he gives them some short exhortations towards good behavior, and says goodbye.

This is not Paul's typical letter. He's not replying to their correspondence, he doesn't tell them what they're doing wrong, he doesn't go into any deep theology. He just writes a nice letter to his friends that he misses, to encourage them. And in the middle of that, he has this bit to remind them what he told them about porneia. Unlike 1 Corinthians, where Paul is replying to concerns they have and ideas they have expressed, this is Paul focusing on what he thinks most important! That's consistent with Paul's inclusion of porneia in most or all of his sin lists in other letters, when no other sin gets referenced nearly as often.

Paul tells them a few things:

• Keep away from porneia. Since the Greek lacks punctuation, the other points could be separate, in which case this is just a sin list and doesn't help us understand porneia at all. But the other points could also be a modifier to explain what avoiding porneia looks like to Paul.
  
• Possess your body in holiness and honor. Exercise self-control, a common Christian virtue.
  
• Do not engage in lustful passions like pagans.
  
• Do not violate the rights of your fellow believer in the above, or God will avenge.
  

The cult of Dionysis was a big thing in Thessaloniki during this period. It was a mystery religion, so kind of by definition they didn't write much down. But it seems that their practices involved getting drunk, letting their god take control of their bodies, and behaving in an animalistic fashion, which may have involved violent orgies. It was also run by women, female cult prostitutes. In that context, the above makes perfect sense. Paul, referencing both literal and metaphorical prostitution, is telling his flock to stay away from the dominant pagan religion in their area.

 

This helps make more sense of the 1 Corinthians passage. The quote marks in the New English Translation help us see that the Corinthians are saying "Oh, because we're not legalists I can have sex with a cult prostitute from another religion and it's just fine! Our bodies don't actually matter, so have fun with them!" And Paul is replying, "No, there are still limits." If we read those limits to be something other than what Paul says they are, that's on us, not on scripture.

  

Porneia is sinful and important to avoid, but is all sex outside of marriage porneia? I have no scriptural reason to think so. There's no clear statement that any New Testament author is opposed to sex outside of marriage, in and of itself. There's not even a clear statement to this effect in the Old Testament, where we usually find such rules! This is a teaching of man that has been elevated to the level of scripture.

So have I just thrown all sexual ethics out the window? By no means! By near-exclusively preaching this man-made doctrine of premarital chastity, I think much of the Church has been missing a deep moral lesson for a very long time. More on that later.

EDIT 2022.03.24: since posting this, I've spent a little time reading through the apocryphal books. The online search tools for them aren't nearly as sophisticated as for the protestant canon, sadly. I'm not done, but I've found two instances of porneia, which are consistent with my above work.

Tobit 4:12, Tobit tells his son to avoid porneia by marrying a relative rather than a foreigner. This is consistent with a primary meaning of apostasy, rather than a sexual meaning.

Wisdom 4:12, in the middle of a long passage about the follies of idolatry, the writer says that "the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication." Again, we see the religious apostasy metaphor, rather than any actual sexual activity.

EDIT 2022.08.22: this article is an excellent discussion of how porenia was used by different groups over time. It's not perfect, I think it misses some pretty critical points of Paul's usage in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 7. But it's fantastic context for this discussion, especially the way it brings sex slavery into the center of it. Which perhaps explains why the root word for porneia is tied to slavery.

Highlights: Greco-Roman women were largely either honorable (under the protection of a man) or dishonorable (somewhere on the slave/prostitute spectrum). (Dishonorable women were not allowed to wear veils, helping explain 1 Corinthians 11.) Adultery was sex with an honorable woman that didn't belong to you, with or without her consent, and was a crime a man committed against another man. Porneia, on the other hand, included sex with "dishonorable" women, who were often slaves. Their use as prostitutes was rape. It was also considered good and beneficial by the larger culture, because if a man was raping slaves, at least he wasn't running around having sex with women that actually mattered...

So when Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4 uses porneia to describe a sin committed against a fellow Christian, it seems likely this is what he was talking about. The Church would likely have included both sex slaves and men who would previously have been raping those sex slaves. Paul would have none of that. "The one who rejects this is not rejecting human authority but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you."

Reconstructing Christian Ethics 01.2: Pseudo-Christian Virtues

I've talked about the virtues that are clearly Christian, derived directly from scripture. There might be some details that I have wrong, but in general I feel comfortable with that list.

I've also talked about virtues that have been historically associated with Christianity, which clearly have substantial overlap with my list.

But what about "virtues" that are often associated with Christianity, but are not Christian? There are quite a few. The ways Christians behave are sometimes the complete inversion of the Christian virtues. This is often due to our taking a legalist approach to scripture, trying to extract some hidden set of commandments from the New Testament, which results in the development of inconsistent rule sets. Here are some example corruptions of each of the virtues we've identified:

• Humility before God
• Unquestioning submission to government authority, tradition, and other man-made systems claiming the moral authority of God
  
• Drive for righteousness and restorative justice
• Belief that any action we take, or any side we take, is, by definition, righteous (self-righteousness)
  
• Non-restorative punishment of wrongdoing by others, as an end unto itself
  
• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom and truth
• Ignorance, rigidity of thought, and unquestioning certainty
• Love and respect
  
• In-group loyalty, exclusion of the other, especially seen with sexual and gender minorities
  
• Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude
  
• Worship of material success
• Prosperity gospel
• Prayer of Jabez
  
• Peacemaking, building relationship and community
• Schism within the Church
  
• Unkindness to fellow Christians, of any church or denomination
  
• Patience and hope
• Lack of long-term care for the world
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
  
• Treating some people as not worthy of kindness and mercy due to their origins, actions, or outside group status
  
• Integrity and self-control
• Purity culture
• Faithfulness and endurance
• Refusal to acknowledge non-adultery causes for divorce
  
• Satisfaction with our present selves, failure to recognize areas for spiritual growth
  

Reconstructing Christian Ethics 01.1: Other References on Christian Virtues

I'm obviously not the first person to have expounded on Christian virtues.

In Gushee and Stanson's text Kingdom Ethics, chapter 2 is called Virtues of Kingdom People. If you want a serious academic treatment of the subject, this is a must-read. I'm just some guy with a blog; they have an entire bibliography and decades of experience in this field. I will quote here the chapter-end summary, because they say it better than I can:

Seek an ethic that asks about the formation and expression of character and not just the actions we should take (being, not just doing); assess any moral decision in light of how it both reflects and would shape the character of the decision maker, the church, the broader community; ask about what posture and practices reflect the specific characteristics of the Beatitudes and thus respond in participate grace to what God is doing to bring in the kingdom.  

NT Wright's After You Believe is a masterful exploration of this subject. If you want an argument as to why our ethics are based in virtues rather than in rules (or worse, in what we feel is right), if this subject interests you at all, read this book. 

Pre-Christian philosophers advocated for four "cardinal virtues":

• Prudence/wisdom
• Justice/piety/gratitude
• Fortitude/endurance
• Temperance/moderation/self-control
  

Of course, the goal of those philosophers was a self-centered Übermensch, which is part of why the Christian approach was a total rewrite of the entire concept of virtue ethics.

Early Christian teachers added to these the three theological virtues, the ones Paul references over and over and over:

• Faith
• Hope
• Love

NT Wright focuses on those three, along with the nine fruits of the spirit. I think one could easily argue that several of the virtues I list are, properly, sub-virtues of these three. Kindness, mercy, and generosity is a particular aspect of Love and respect, for example. Integrity and self-control are a particular aspect of Faith and endurance. As I said in my previous post, my particular list is not the only way to slice or arrange these virtues. I just find it helpful.

Wright also talks very briefly about four other virtues:

• Humility
• Charity
• Patience
• Chastity
  

At some point in Church history, another list of seven virtues was published that corresponded to the seven deadly sins:

• Chastity
• Temperance
• Charity
• Diligence
• Patience
• Kindness
• Humility
  

There's obviously a good bit of overlap between those lists and mine. I am, of course, by no means certain my list is complete or in any other way perfect. Any of these structures might be helpful.