INTRODUCTION
1.Nicholas Thomas (aka N. T.) Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Books, 2008), 214.
2.Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations will come from The New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), translation approved by United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2010).
3.Many in this chorus will be cited throughout this volume. For a good introduction to this focus, see Christopher Ruddy, “In Defense of Desire: The Theology of James Alison,” Commonweal 136/2 (January 30, 2009): 12–15.
4.David H. Jensen, God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 45. Childbearing is, of course, another obvious way this happens, though this was not noted by Jensen.
5.James Alison, “The Gay Thing: Following the Still Small Voice,” in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, ed. Gerald Loughlin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 55. This strikes some as a devilish idea. As Mark Twain wryly observed, many of those Christians concluded that “only someone like Satan would find the loss of such joy unintelligible!” Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard Devoto (New York: Harper and Row, 1938), 8.
6.Arland Dean Jacobson, “Jesus against the Family: The Dissolution of Family Ties in the Gospel Tradition,” in From Quest to Q: Festschrift James M. Robinson, ed. Jon Ma. Asgeirsson, Kristin De Troyer, and Marvin W. Meyers (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000), 189–218.
7.Many feminist theologians use the term Kin-dom, rather than Kingdom or even Reign of God, because it denotes the intimate interpersonal friendships that siblings ideally enjoy while connoting the nonhierarchical character of this cosmic communion (inclusive of even our Brother Sun and Sister Moon).
8.The emergence of the title for Mary of Theotokos cannot help but underscore the sanctity of motherhood through its association of pregnancy with the call of all Christ’s disciples to be God-bearers, that is, to embody God in our lives.
9.In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle first described desire as identical with the joy experienced as activity or energy (Greek energeia). See Nicomachean Ethics book 10, chapter 4, 1174a11ff.
10.According to predominant models, sexual desire is presumed to be awakened by preferred objects or stimuli. This experience can then be followed by genital arousal (vasocongestion, lubrication, and so on) excitement and orgasm. Traina suggests that this is an androcentric model, which may not even take adequate account of all men’s sexual experience and certainly does not comprehend most women’s sexual experience. She notes that recent research suggests that in women’s experience arousal precedes sexual desire, which may or may not follow. When viewing visual stimuli, women’s experience of arousal may be more flexible than men’s. As Traina puts it, for women sexual desire appears to be more like a possible product of genital arousal rather than a necessary precursor of it, and physical arousal is not necessarily an indicator of psychological arousal. In this regard Traina cites the work of Meredith L. Chivers, “A Brief Review and Discussion of Sex Differences in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal,” Sexual and Relationship Therapy 20/4 (2005): 377–390, and Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Women’s Love and Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). See Cristina H. L. Traina, Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 47–70.
11.I recognize the imperfections of this definition. Engorgement does not always signal sexual desire, and one can certainly experience erotic passion without engorgement. And yet, most of the time for most people, this signals sexual arousal. It is my hope that this working definition will prove to be both flexible and focused enough to serve this query.
12.Thomas Hobbes (1588–1678) was among the first philosophers to distinguish sexual desire from other desires, such as those for food and the like, precisely because it has this dual agenda, both to be pleased and to please.
13.Traina, Erotic Attunement, 7.
14.Traina contrasts her view with that of the Roman Catholic Church, which defines all desire for companionship as sexual rather than erotic. Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1995), Section 2332.
15.James B. Nelson, Body Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992).
16.Robin Scroggs, “Paul and the Eschatological Woman,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40/3 (Spring 1972): 283–303.
17.Raymond Kemp Anderson, “Corporate Selfhood and Meditatio Vitae Futurae: How Necessary Is Eschatology for Christian Ethics?” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 23/1 (Spring–Summer 2003): 39–40.
18.Henry H. Knight III, Anticipating Heaven Below: Optimism of Grace from Wesley to the Pentecostals (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2014), 11.
19.Christopher Morse, The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News (New York: T&T Clark, 2010).
20.From a lecture by Nester O. Miguez entitled “Doing Theology in a Non-Revolutionary Situation,” Delivered at Saint Paul School of Theology, Kansas City, MO, February 18, 2009.
21.David Cloutier, “Composing Love Songs for the Kingdom of God? Creation and Eschatology in Catholic Sexual Ethics,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 24/2 (2004): 71–88.
22.John Paul II, The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1984), 18.
23.Elizabeth Stuart, “Queering Death,” in The Sexual Theologian: Essays on Sex, God and Politics, ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood (London: Continuum, 2005), 58–70. In her essay Stuart is clear that risen life will be without gender and presumably sexless too, since she interprets the comment attributed to Jesus in John 20:17 as referring back to the clinging testified to in Genesis 2 and as implying that in Christ “all clinging” is to stop.
24.Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, “Eschatological Imagination,” The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread and Resurrection (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 15–48.
25.For rich accounts of feminist concerns about traditional forms of eschatology, see Catherine Keller, “Eschatology,” in Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 87, and Rosemary Radford Reuther, “Eschatology and Feminism,” in Lift Every Voice: Constructive Christian Theologies from the Underside, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 129–142.
26.See Helen Rhee, “Wealth, Poverty and Eschatology: Pre-Constantine Christian Social Thought and the Hope for the World to Come,” in Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for Twenty-First-Century Christian Social Thought, ed. Johan Leemans, Brian J. Matz, and Johan Verstraeten (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2011), 64–84.
27.See Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom: Crossing Press, 1984), 53–59; Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroads, 1988); Carter Heyward, The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989).
28.Wendy Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), xvii–xix.
29.See Barbara Blodgett, Constructing the Erotic: Sexual Ethics and Adolescent Girls (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 60–83.
30.Geoffrey Rees, The Romance of Innocent Sexuality (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011).
31.John Anthony McGuckin, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Doctrine and Spiritual Culture (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 422.
32.William Stacey Johnson, A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law and Politics (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006).
33.Margaret D. Kamitsuka, “Sex in Heaven? Eschatological Eros and the Resurrection of the Body,” in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 261–276.
34.Jensen, God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality, 68.
CHAPTER 1. GENERAL RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
1.On these points see Wright, Surprised by Hope, 27–30. See as well Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 13, and Oscar Cullman, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans. F. Filson, 3rd ed. (London: SCM, 1962).
2.While defending some of his ninety-five theses in 1520, the great Reformer Martin Luther described as “monstrous” these presumptions about the immortality of the soul. He condemned them because he thought they served as anthropological foundations for the notion of purgatory and the practice of what Luther eventually came to call “saint worship.” For more details, see Martin Luther, “Assertion of All the Articles of M. Luther Condemned by the Newest Bull of Leo X,” November 29, 1520, Art. 27, in the Works of Martin Luther, vol. 7 (Weimar: Hermann Bohlhaus Nachfolger, 1897), 131–132. See as well Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 414–415.
3.Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 8.
4.Wright, Surprised by Hope, 200. As discussed in the introduction to this volume, the moral life is greatly influenced by eschatological convictions. This interpretation has been confirmed by many theologians over the centuries. For example, I am grateful to my colleague Young Ho Chun for drawing my attention both to John Wesley’s sermon “Salvation Is a Present Thing” and to the work of the Dominican physician and theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., both of whom argued that in Christ human history (our present time) is being ontologically transformed.
5.Consider texts that arguably could be interpreted to mean that believers no longer truly die (John 5:24, 8:51, 11:25–26), that the dead are with God (Mark 5:39; 1 Corinthians 15:20; 2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:23; 1 Thessalonians 4:14; Hebrews 4:9; Acts 7:59; 1 Peter 4:19), or that appear to testify directly about this “intermediate state” (Luke 16:19, 23:43; 1 Peter 3:19; 4:6). Nevertheless, it should be conceded there is still very little detail in the Bible about precisely what might happen between an individual’s death and the coming in fullness of Christ’s Reign at the end of time.
6.This notion was officially enshrined by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, promulgated again in the 1336 declaration by Pope Benedict XII in Benedictus Deus, and reiterated during the Fifth Lateran Council, when Pope Leo X in 1513 condemned those who asserted the mortality of the intelligent soul. This view was confirmed most recently by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (hereafter CDF) of the Roman Catholic Church when it argued: “The Church understands this resurrection as referring to the whole person; for the elect it is nothing other than the extension to human beings of the Resurrection of Christ itself. … The Church affirms that a spiritual element survives and subsists after death, an element endowed with consciousness and will, so that the ‘human self’ subsists.” See the CDF’s 1979 “Letter on Certain Questions Concerning Eschatology,” http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19790517_escatologia_en.html.
7.The saints, canonized or not, are alive in Christ, and for Roman Catholic Christians among others this means the dead can and do pray for and with us. At its best, like the tending of ancestral graveyards, the treasuring of the relics of the saints kept alive this sense of connection between the living and the dead. But by the late Middle Ages, the veneration of relics became problematic. Superstitions about relics emerged and relics were faked, bought, sold, traded, and stolen, as if the power of prayer could be so manipulated. Protestants perhaps still worry that this focus on the saints detracts from emphasis on the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
Still, this sense of communion is not a peculiarly Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic experience, as evidenced by the Protestant novelist Wendell Berry. One of his protagonists, Hannah Coulter, says when speaking of the population of her fictive hometown, Port William, “The membership includes the dead.” See Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2004), 94. In his analysis of resurrection themes in Berry’s literary corpus, United Methodist theologian D. Brent Laytham notes that Berry is right to complain that Christianity is not earthy enough. Hymns like “This World Is Not My Home” deny that God has made all things well and instead call us away from this earth. See D. Brent Laytham, “‘The Membership Includes the Dead’: Wendell Berry’s Port William Membership as Communio Sanctorum,” in Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven’s Earthly Life, ed. Joel James Schuman and L. Roger Owens (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 173–189.
8.Perhaps the most famous Roman Catholic to hold this position is Karl Rahner, S.J. He speculated that resurrection occurs at the moment of death. For an extensive review of various Catholic views, see Bernard P. Prusak, “Bodily Resurrection in Catholic Perspectives,” Theological Studies 61/1 (February 2000): 64–105.
9.Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 253. This text was originally published in German in 1977.
10.Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) (1965), 14, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
11.These statistics come from the Pew Foundation, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” (2007), accessed July 7, 2012 at http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-key-findings.pdf. NB: most Christian theologians and pastors would agree that the idea that death results in personal annihilation (period) is not compatible with Christian faith.
12.Lisa Miller, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife (New York: Harper, 2010). Data from a 2003 Harris poll, she reports, indicated that 30 percent of the U.S. population believed in reincarnation. This is a notion traditionally associated with Hinduism, even though 21 percent of those who indicated they believed in reincarnation had self-identified as Christian.
13.The absolute ban on cremation was first lifted by the Vatican in 1963. Following funeral services, cremation was permitted for good reasons, but burial was still clearly preferred. This has been followed by increased openness to cremation, but not over internment. These changes were codified in 1983 when the Code of Canon Law was last revised. See Code of Canon Law, Canon 1176 and Libreria Editrica Vaticana, 1983, accessed December 2, 2015, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_INDEX.HTM#fonte. They were maintained in the recently revised Catholic funeral rites. See the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, Order of Christian Funerals (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1989). An addition to these regulations was made by the Vatican in 1997, permitting U.S. bishops on a case-by-case basis to allow funeral Masses in the presence of cremated remains.
14.Ramsey MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 56–57.
15.The careful consideration of which burial practices might best bear such witness in our world today would take us too far afield, but it is certainly an ethical question worthy of more sustained attention than it is currently receiving in most places.
16.Barbara Brown Taylor makes this point by asking this question: what else besides—that is, apart from—the body can be sanctified? She concludes that the Christian moral life must consist in “practicing incarnation” because, as the Brian Wren hymn proclaims so beautifully, “Good is the flesh that the Word has become.” Barbara Brown Taylor, “Our Bodies, Our Faith,” Christian Century 126/2 (January 27, 2009): 24–29.
17.For a recent detailed account of this, see Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden: Blackwell, 2005).
18.For a broad review of classical Western thinkers in this regard, philosophers and theologians alike, see James Alfred Martin Jr., Beauty and Holiness: The Dialogue between Aesthetics and Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). For a fine evaluation of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s efforts in this regard, see Susan A. Ross, “Women, Beauty and Justice: Moving beyond von Balthasar,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 25/1 (Spring/Summer, 2005): 79–98. For a compelling account of the often overlooked but powerful role beauty plays in evoking and sustaining the work of justice, see Patrick A. McCormick, God’s Beauty: A Call to Justice (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2012).
19.The nature of the sacramental character of marriage from a Protestant perspective was perhaps most famously noted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “A Wedding Sermon from a Prison Cell, May, 1943,” Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald Fuller, Frank Clark, et al. (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 41–55. For more contemporary arguments, see Timothy D. Lincoln “Sacramental Marriage: A Possibility for Protestant Theology,” ATLAS Proceedings (1995): 205–216, and especially Elizabeth Myer Boulton and Matthew Boulton, “Sacramental Sex: Divine Love and Human Intimacy,” Christian Century 128/6 (March 22, 2011): 28–31.
Noteworthy here too is the explicit reluctance of other Protestants to equate marital sex with sacrament. Such claims strike them as idolatrous. See Stanley J. Grenz, Sexual Ethics: An Evangelical Perspective (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 83. To be sure, I would concur that sex per se is not salvific, but much in both scripture and tradition suggest that sexual activity can mediate the presence of God and thus be a locus wherein humans may encounter God.
20.For a sampling of texts ordinarily interpreted in support of this claim, see Matthew 25:31–46 and Acts 3:4–7, 8:4–8, and 28:3–6.
21.These are described as prima facie—on first appearance—duties precisely because other obligations may legitimately override their fulfillment, or because circumstances may prevent their fulfillment.
22.For more on this, see Stephanie Paulsell, Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002). See as well Rick Warren, Daniel Amen, and Mark Hyman, The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013).
23.See the book of Ecclesiastes for biblical testimony in this regard. For a detailed description of how living with jouissance, honoring the body, and the love of God intersect around the delights of eating well, see L. Shannon Jung, Sharing Food: Christian Practices for Enjoyment (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006).
24.Mary Catherine Hilkert, O.P., “Grace-Optimism,” America 202/2 (January 18, 2010): 4.
25.Within Judaism, the yetzer hara or evil inclination is rooted in the misuse of what the body needs for survival.
26.Susan A. Ross, Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (New York: Continuum Books, 1998), 64–96. While Ross addresses this issue at many junctures throughout the text, the third chapter on “Women, the Sacraments and Ambiguity” is especially relevant. For another feminist take on these issues, see Melanie A. Mays, A Body Knows: A Theopoetics of Death and Resurrection (New York: Continuum, 1995).
27.Interestingly, sometimes when our possessions are defaced or our homes are invaded, we feel personally violated. But this only happens when we consider those things or that space to be in a real sense an extension of our elves. We don’t feel this way about property that is not “ours” in this highly personal sense.
28.In the history of ethics it was precisely the recognition of the distinction of our persons from our bodies that enabled ethicists to distinguish surgical procedures (however invasive and risky) from violent assaults.
29.For a detailed account of the connection between embodiment and sociality, see L. Shannon Jung, “Spatiality, Relativism and Authority,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50/2 (June 1982): 215–235.
30.Morse, The Difference Heaven Makes.
31.Genuine thanksgiving naturally produces good stewardship of and a sense of true kinship with the rest of creation. The affirmation of the dignity and worth of all persons as children of a good and gracious God, as well as of the love of God for all creation, leads Christians to care for the entire cosmic web of life in which we are embedded and by which we are sustained.
32.Miller, Heaven, 75. Of course, the quote originated in J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Boston: Little and Brown, 1966), 171.
33.This tension found voice early in church history in the differences between two schools of theological thought about the Incarnation. According to one school of thought historically associated with Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and still presently emphasized in some Reformed theologies, it is important to keep discreet the two natures of Christ. Given the ambiguity of embodiment, it is understood to tie people to corruptibility and death. God is thought to have become human in order to help people overcome the frailties identified with material life. Union with this Incarnate God liberates us from such bodily bondage and the vanities of this world. Blurring the human and divine will denigrate the Christ’s transcendent nature. One must avoid such idolatry. Thus, within an Alexandrine model of the Incarnation, only a relatively weak claim can be made about the sanctification of what is corporeal. This Christology minimizes the role the Incarnation plays in the economy of salvation. It is primarily the point of connection or mediation between a largely transcendent spiritual God and humanity/creation. Not surprisingly, within this school of thought, Christian sacraments are understood merely to sign essentially spiritual realities.
In contrast, theologians historically associated with Antioch, such as Irenaeus, gave an account of the doctrine of the Incarnation that emphasized the interpenetration of Christ’s human and divine natures. From this perspective, Jesus Christ reveals that God pervades all of life. The earth is seen as suffused with God’s immanent Presence. Within this Antiochene framework, the Infinite Triune God intends from the beginning to embrace the finite and to body forth into the material world. Human sin was not the only or even the primary reason for the Incarnation. Rather in Christ God’s pervasive activity in the world is revealed. People experience the Presence of God in their midst not in spite of but rather through their sensuality. We encounter God in the body and the world. Correspondingly, within this theological school, Christian sacraments are understood to disclose God’s Real Presence in our midst, here and now.
More about these two viewpoints will be discussed in chapter 4. Meanwhile, let me be clear. Though there are merits to each perspective, it is I am sure clear by now that it is within the Antiochene school of thought that I stand.
34.Gregory of Nazianzus, “Gregory of Nazianzus on Apollinarianism,” in Christian Theology Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Alister E. McGrath (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 229.
35.Traditionally, at least four qualities will further distinguish those raised as saints. Their glorified bodies will (1) be beyond the reach of pain and even inconvenience (that is, they will be impassible), (2) have all the energy, agility, and power they are pleased to have, (3) be luminous to different degrees (1 Corinthians 15:41–43), and (4) enjoy “subtlety,” a kind of spirit-like fineness or delicacy, like that which enabled Christ to pass through doors.
36.At least prima facie the Islamic account of the world to come is more clearly sensual. Paradise is filled not only with cool fountains and fresh fruits, but also great sex, at least for heterosexual males. In her book on Heaven, Miller notes that most translations of the Holy Quran promise male residents of heaven the company of beautiful maidens (houri), and that later accounts of the sayings of Mohammad (hadiths) promise seventy to seventy-two virgins to male religious martyrs. See Miller, Heaven, 95–101.
37.John Paul II, “The Sacramentality of Marriage,” The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston: Pauline Books, 1997), 350.
38.Grenz, Sexual Ethics, 26. To be fair to Grenz, he did go on to affirm that dimensions of sexuality he considers “deeper” may not be eradicated.
39.Indeed what is inconsistent in this framework is that gender so often plays a part in traditional speculations about our life to come. Feminist theologians suggest, however, that it should not be surprising that fairly rigid, binary accounts of gender are often not left out of heavenly speculations. A genderless vision of heaven might suggest the “specter” of the loss of patriarchal systems of power and authority.
40.See Ben Witherington III, The Rest of Life: Rest, Play, Eating, Studying, Sex from a Kingdom Perspective (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 113–153.
41.Ibid., 127.
42.Ibid., 156.
43.Ibid., 152.
44.Ibid., 155.
CHAPTER 2. THE NEW TESTAMENT ABOUT THE GENERAL RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
1.Harry Rabinowicz, “Death,” Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 5, ed. Fred Skolnik (New York: Thomson and Gale, 2007), 510–513.
2.Texts that are generally understood to testify to this view include Genesis 2:19, 25:8; Psalm 104:29; and Job 34:14–15.
3.I say—for the most part—because noted in the Hebrew Bible are two exceptions to the generally accepted notion that life ends with death. Enoch—a patriarch about whom little else is known except that he walked with God before “the Flood”—is not reported in the Hebrew Scriptures to have died. Instead, after a (comparatively) short life, Enoch “walked with God, and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Similarly, according to the Hebrew scriptures, the beloved prophet Elijah did not die but was instead taken up into heaven in rather spectacular style in a chariot of fire in a whirlwind, and so on (1 Kings 17–21 and 2 Kings 2:11).
Generally speaking, Christians do not interpret these as resurrection stories for three reasons. First, neither Enoch nor Elijah were portrayed as having died. Second, for Christians, resurrection is not just about going away from earth to live in heaven, or even about escaping death, but rather, it is about being transfigured or transformed bodily for new life with Christ in a new heaven and new earth. Third, Christians believe that Christ’s resurrection was the first fruits of the general resurrection of the dead.
4.BCE stands for “Before the Common Era,” while CE stands for the “Common Era.” They have the same value as BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, Latin for the year of the Lord), respectively. The word “common” is generally understood simply to refer to the fact that this system is based on the most frequently used—Gregorian—calendar. Though I recognize this to be a matter of controversy for some Christians (see Resolution Nine at the annual Southern Baptist Convention in 2000), I choose to employ this designation as an expression of respect for the religious liberty of all my potential readers.
5.Texts that are generally understood to testify to this vision include Psalm 6:6, Isaiah 38:18, and Numbers 16:33.
6.Ratzinger, Eschatology, 83.
7.While a few Christian scholars may interpret the desire to enjoy the presence of God expressed in Psalms 73:16 as an expression of hope for the vision of God after death, most scholars believe the focus of the text is on the hope for the presence of God in the here and now.
8.See Ezekiel 37, Hosea 6:2, and Isaiah 26:19.
9.Jon D. Levinson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
10.Early in the twentieth century many scholars believed the apocalyptic visions of these early Jewish activists of this era could be traced back to Persia. They believed that they had probably been influenced by the robust, imaginative Persian accounts of an afterlife in which the righteous were rewarded with bodily resurrection. They saw such an eschatological vision rooted in the religion of the ancient Persian Empire, known as Zoroastrianism, which was centered in modern-day Iran. It offered a powerfully influential worldview, in which the world and its creatures would eventually—on the day of Final Judgment—be purged of both evil and mortality. However, the vivid pictures of a cosmic war between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness” found in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran laid to rest the hypothesis that largely “foreign” influences rested behind apocalyptic developments in nascent Judaism.
11.Apocalyptic revelations normally predict or presage at least in part imminent, total disaster and universal destruction. The term has Greek roots, which mean to uncover or disclose. For more on this specific vision, see John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
12.Neither Jews nor Protestants grant 1 and 2 Maccabees canonical status. Some Protestants include it in the Apocrypha. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians recognize both books as part of the Christian Bible.
13.For a detailed analysis, see Dag Ølstein Endsjø, Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
14.Indeed the notion of an individual person gaining eternal life is an idea that dates far back into Western literature. In the “Epic of Gilgamesh” (dating from the thirteenth century BCE) Utnapishtim is granted immortality by the gods for his heroic action.
15.Dag Ølstein Endsjø, Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 227. See notes 52, 53, 54, and 55.
16.“Dead” is plural in the original (Greek) New Testament texts relevant to this issue.
17.See note 3 in this chapter for why I have concluded that the stories about Enoch and Elijah, like the restorative healings of the dead in the Elijah-Elisha cycle, should count at most as exceptions that prove this rule.
18.In his letters, Paul himself does not speak of having a mission in Athens. It is only described as such in a later document by the author of Luke-Acts. See Acts 17:18, 31–32, 23:6.
19.See Romans 6–8 (especially Romans 8:11); 1 Corinthians 6:14, 15:12; 2 Corinthians 4:14, 5:1–10; Philippians 3:21; 1 Thessalonians 4:12–16; 2 Timothy 2:11; and Hebrews 6:2.
20.An even fuller, more complete account would also include detailed analyses of all the texts related both to the Transfiguration and the Ascension of Jesus as well as of the quite sensuous account of life to come found in Revelation.
21.See Matthew 22:29; Mark 12:18–27; Luke 14:14, 20:37; and John 5:28–29, 6:39–40, 11:25.
22.It may be best at this juncture for me to lay my theological cards on the table, even though many scholars these days keep silent about their convictions in this regard. I believe it is wrong to conclude that the Easter events described in the Bible testify only to the arising of faith in the early church. Likewise, it is mistaken to suggest that apostolic testimonies about encounters with the Risen Christ refer only to a profound experience of the forgiveness of God. While both the gift of faith and a gracious sense of personal salvation undoubtedly accompanied encounters with the Risen Christ, spiritualizing Jesus’s physical body out of the resurrection is not the sensus literalis of the New Testament texts—and I think this approach does grave harm to the sensus plenior of the witness. I interpret these texts to say that Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead and that his resurrection is the first fruit of a general resurrection of the body to come. Given the surprising, somewhat unprecedented character of their faith claims, first-century talk of resurrection could hardly have been simply another way of saying that the soul (alone) would live on after death. The apostles would simply have said that only Jesus’s spirit had ascended to heaven, not his body. Audacious as it sounds, it is unreasonable to assume that is all to which they were testifying. For a brilliant exposition of this viewpoint, see Wright’s Surprised by Hope.
23.See Matthew 28:9; Luke 24:36–43; and John 20:27, 21:12–13.
24.See Luke 24:13–16 and John 20:19.
25.Wright is well aware that nearly from its origin this biblical portrait of a new heaven and new earth also had to compete with Plato’s vision of disembodied immortal souls finding their bliss at death.
26.Alan F. Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 698–699.
27.Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999), 526.
28.Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, S.J., notes in his commentary on this text that it may record the oldest expression we have of Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, S.J., First Corinthians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
29.One popular contemporary hypothesis is that many in the Corinthian community had begun to operate with an “over realized” eschatology, that is, with an eschatology that exaggerated the extent to which God’s Kin-dom has “already” been realized on the one hand, and downplayed, if not ignored, on the other hand, the degree to which it is “not yet.” Since most of Paul’s letters tend to emphasize the continuity between our lives in Christ here on earth and in the next, it would not be unreasonable to assume Paul’s preaching might have likewise underscored this continuity as well. There is some textual evidence supportive of this claim. “But each in turn: Christ, the first fruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him” (1 Corinthians 15:23). A few Corinthians may even have believed they had already arrived at the fullness of the life of faith and completely collapsed the fullness of God’s future Kin-dom into their present. While Paul preached that the resurrected life of the world to come had been inaugurated in Christ Jesus, it seems to me that a tendency toward “over realized” eschatology could gain this sort of traction, only if the promise of such transformation was misunderstood to be purely spiritual. I believe this was in fact the deeper misunderstanding that truly worried Paul, and so it is on that misunderstanding that I focus in this chapter.
30.Robert W. Wall, J. Paul Sampley, and N. T. Wright, The New Interpreter’s Bible: Acts–First Corinthians (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 973–990.
31.Their questions are readily understandable. As Fitzmeyer notes, little qualifies Paul’s proclamation in this passage. We might well hypothesize that Paul’s preaching about Jesus’s resurrection, prior to this correspondence, may have been similarly unqualified. Specifically, Fitzmeyer notes, Jesus’s resurrection is not specified as bodily in nature. (The Greek term soma does not appear in this text. Fitzmeyer also notes that Jesus is not proclaimed to have been raised “from the dead” (Greek ek nekron), though that—it seems to me—is certainly implied by its literary context.) Fitzmeyer, First Corinthians.
32.About this Paul had no doubts. He states this claim most clearly in his letter to the Romans: “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection” (Romans 6: 4–5).
33.See 1 Corinthians 15:29. Why else, Paul asks, would those in the latter group undergo baptisms apparently on behalf of and in the name of the dead, if those dearly departed would not—through this effort to incorporate them into Christ via a proxy—thereby be raised up? Though perhaps problematic on other fronts, this sacramental practice certainly bespeaks a lively sense among some believers in Corinth of the general resurrection.
34.In addition to his encounter on the road with the risen Lord, Paul experienced further personal disclosures by Jesus (Acts 23:11) and encounters with the Mystery of eternity after his conversion (2 Corinthians 12:1–10).
35.When Paul describes Jesus as the first fruit, his analogy may have been understood or intended to be biological as well as agricultural, in which case Jesus might have been understood as the first born of a large family in which all the brothers and sisters share in the inheritance of this new life.
36.I speak of it this way because the gospels indicate the basileia tou theou began prior to Jesus’s resurrection. Jesus’s resurrection inaugurated the final culmination of the Kin-dom of God that began in a more hidden way in his earthly life and ministry as it drew all those united with Him in faith into kinship with God, each other, and the cosmos.
37.Initially, Paul may have believed the Parousia was imminent. So, while he argued this ultimate transformation was yet to come, he probably thought the time for it was near. But Paul lived a relatively long time after his conversion. If he initially thought the Lord Jesus would return within a few years, he surely was compelled by the brute force of his pastoral longevity to adjust this view.
38.This notion finds expression in a multitude of places beyond 1 Corinthians 15 in the Pauline corpus, but Romans 8 and Philippians 3 would be good places to turn for more such testimony.
39.Segal, Life after Death, 429–430.
40.William Barclay, The Letters to the Corinthians, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), 141. Other biblical theologians with roughly similar interpretations include Rudolf Bultmann and Jerome Murphy-O’Connor.
41.J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014).
CHAPTER 3. THE NEW TESTAMENT ABOUT SEX IN HEAVEN
1.Daniel J. Louw, “Sexual Health: Towards an Eschatological Understanding of Sexual Love and Human Embodiment,” Cura Vita: Illness and the Healing of Life (Wellington: Lux Verbi, 2008).
2.This inordinate experience of sexual desire she distinguishes from healthy experiences of sexual desire. See Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Press, 2005), 75.
3.Ibid., 70.
4.Of note is the fact that Paul offers no explanation as to why sexual activity might hinder prayer or why sexual abstinence might serve it. Some interpreters suggest that this attitude may express a residue in Paul of the purity concerns found in the Holiness Code from which Paul may not have yet been freed. Consider for example the concern expressed in Leviticus 15:18: “When a man has sexual relations with a woman and there is an emission of semen, both of them must bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening.” For more about this approach to this text, see Theodore Mackin, S.J., The Marital Sacrament (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989).
5.Like Louw, William Stacey Johnson argues that apart from sexuality, creation was not complete. The provision of gender, sexual desire, and delight enable humans to become better at giving glory to God. Sexuality has the potential to provide a foretaste of the redemptive reordering that will be the new creation. Johnson, A Time to Embrace.
6.See Matthew 22:1–14, 25:1–13; Luke 12:36; John 2:1–11, 3:29; and Mark 2:19.
7.Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997), 270.
8.There are various ancient manuscripts of this gospel. According to the New International Version (hereafter NIV), in one manuscript, more is added to verse 8 so that the gospel concludes: “Then they quickly reported all these instructions to those around Peter. After this, Jesus himself also sent out through them from east to west the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen.” This version does not include vv. 9–20. Other (even later) manuscripts of this gospel provide readers with a different, longer ending. In this later version we are told Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, who went and told those mourning that “he was alive and had been seen by her.” But she was not believed. This is followed by the story of an appearance to two disciples walking out into the country, but their testimony was not believed either. This is followed by the story of Jesus appearing to the eleven while at table, where he chides them for not believing the earlier testimonies and commissions them to proclaim the good news. This is followed by a brief account of the Ascension. See Mark 16:9–20, NIV.
9.See Matthew 28:1–8; Luke 24: 1–9; and John 20:1–10.
10.Daniel A. Smith, Revisiting the Empty Tomb: The Early History of Easter (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010).
11.There is some debate among biblical scholars about whether Jesus was himself a Pharisee or simply heavily influenced by this movement.
12.The name for this practice stems from levir, a Latin term for brother-in-law. According to the commentary on Mark in The New Interpreter’s Bible, there is little evidence that the custom of levirate marriage was actually observed in Palestine during the first century of the Common Era. Hence, most scholars believe the case was probably purely hypothetical—“trumped up,” as it were—by the Sadducees. See Leander E. Keck, The New Interpreter’s Bible: Matthew–Mark (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 676. Indeed, Lamar Williamson Jr. argues that the type of scoffing question put to Jesus here is known in the Jewish tradition as a “vulgarity” (in Hebrew boruth) because it is so contemptuous of the person addressed. However, it cannot be dismissed as an utterly ludicrous query, given the intertestamental story of Sarah who had survived seven husbands (Tobit 3:8, 6:14). See Lamar Williamson Jr., Mark: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1983), 222.
13.John R. Donahue, S.J., and Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), 439, 352. (This is volume 2 in the Sacra Pagina series of which Daniel Harrington, S.J., was the general editor.)
14.Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). This is part of the Anchor Yale Bible series.
15.M. Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).
16.This is certainly what is argued by N. T. Wright in The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 341.
17.Colleen MacDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
18.In the Old Testament, the “fallen” or bad angels are described as seducing women and even procreating with them. “When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased. Then the LORD said: My spirit shall not remain in human beings forever, because they are only flesh. Their days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown. When the LORD saw how great the wickedness of human beings was on earth, and how every desire that their heart conceived was always nothing but evil, the LORD regretted making human beings on the earth, and his heart was grieved. So the LORD said: I will wipe out from the earth the human beings I have created, and not only the human beings, but also the animals and the crawling things and the birds of the air, for I regret that I made them. But Noah found favor with the LORD” (Genesis 6:1–8). A more elaborate version of this can be found in the book of Enoch, which is treated as canonical by Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches, but not by Jews or believers from other Christian denominations.
19.Marcus, Mark 8–16, 833–834. According to Marcus, the interpretation of such sexual activity as paradigmatically impure makes sense for at least two reasons. First, like bestiality, it represents a mixing of species, which God did not intend. And second, if sexuality for humans is designed only, or at least always, for the preservation of the species, then sterile sexual liaisons could not be licit. One problem, of course, with such a presumption is that it does not address why angels would have been created with sexual desire in the first place.
20.Only here in the Lukan edition of the story is the Greek compound form—isangeloi—used. In both Mark and Matthew, the Greek expression hos angeloi is used. The former connotes only similarity and likeness, not equality as well.
21.Though others within Byzantium were more moderate, by the early Middle Ages, the best marriage within Russian orthodoxy was an unconsummated one. The “cult of virginity” was present in Western Europe as well. Historian Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks summarizes the situation there at this point as follows: “Sexual relations with one’s spouse were also to be kept within strict bounds, and were prohibited when the wife was menstruating, pregnant, or nursing a child, and during certain periods in the church calendar, such as Sundays, Fridays and most major saints’ days, as well as all of Lent and Advent. This left about fifty days a year when a married couple could legitimately have sexual intercourse, and even this was hemmed in by restrictions as to position (prone, man on top), time of day (night only), and proper dress (at least partially clothed). Following the rules did not free one from ritual defilement, however, for couples were expected to wash after sex before coming to church.” Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (New York: Routledge, 2000), 37.
22.Though there are some who question this claim, there is considerable agreement that Jesus was both single and celibate.
23.For a full presentation of this argument, see Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1998). NB: This is a problematic conclusion on a number of theological grounds, not the least of which is the fact, as Tom Driver pointed out decades ago, that sexuality is so pervasive a reality in the animal world that to assign it to the Fall in toto would eventually necessitates some form of Manicheism. Only then could a good God be absolved of its creation. Thomas Faw Driver, “Sexuality and Jesus,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 20/3 (March 1965): 235–246.
24.At the time of his writing this letter, Paul was evidently unmarried. (See 1 Corinthians 7:8.) Tradition commonly portrayed him as never having been married, but contemporary scholarship suggests that if he (Saul) was a Pharisee, and a member of the Sanhedrin, as many think he was prior to his conversion, social norms would have “nearly required” him to have been married at some point. So, Paul could have been divorced (and not remarried) or widowed. In any case, while the Bible is clear about Paul’s status as not married during his ministry, it does not provide us with information about his (Saul’s) marital history.
25.Such is, of course, presumed given the biblical witness to Jesus’s circumcision. “When eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21).
26.Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not, 75.
27.Though a feast commemorating this event has been celebrated since the sixth century, even when the exposure of Jesus’s genitals became popular during the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they were frequently portrayed as uncircumcised. I would guess this reflected the anti-Semitism of the era. Graham Ward suggests such politics of embodiment are inevitable. What is assumed to be valuable or to be denigrated in any given time and place—what is associated with the powerful or the marginalized—will shape accounts of Jesus’s body. Our task is to be open to correction, critique, and supplementation. See Graham Ward, “Politics of Embodiment and the Mystery of All Flesh,” in The Sexual Theologian: Essays on Sex, God and Politics, ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 71–85.
28.Lewis Smedes, Sex for Christians: The Limits and Liberties of Sexual Living, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 62.
29.Although it has no parallels in the other gospels, much argues against Matthean authorship of this teaching. Foremost is the fact that it contradicts the clear Jewish moral condemnation of castration as an offense against nature.
30.In his multivolume commentary on Matthew, biblical scholar Ulrich Luz concludes: “In the ancient church Matthew 19:11–12 played only a minor role, and then primarily to justify sexual abstinence. It was not until the Middle Ages that these verses became the cardinal text for the ‘evangelical counsel’ concerning chastity.” Ulrich Luz, Matthew: A Commentary, vol. 2, trans. Wilhelm C. Linss (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1989), 497.
31.For a detailed review of the literature in this regard, see J. David Hester, “Eunuchs and the Postgender Jesus: Matthew 19:12 and Transgressive Sexualities,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 28/1 (2005): 13–40.
32.The Greek found in 1 Corinthians 7:7 is somewhat ambiguous. Paul is clearly speaking of his own celibacy as a charisma and perhaps, given the final phrase “one having one kind and another a different kind,” he is suggesting that marriage is also a charisma. Or, it could be interpreted as a more general statement that other people have other charismata.
33.Amy Jill Levine’s answer to this question was that Jesus did not endorse marriage at Cana. She claims that by attending the wedding feast at Cana, Jesus did not endorse marriage “any more than eating with sinners endorses sin.” Perhaps one could reach such a conclusion if in the narrative about Cana Jesus had been reported merely to have accompanied his mother to the event. However, the miracle at Cana contributed to the festivities and surely contributed to the celebration as such of “one flesh” unions. For more details about her perspective, see Amy Jill Levine, “The Word Becomes Flesh: Jesus, Gender and Sexuality,” in Jesus Two Thousand Years Later, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Walter P. Weaver (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000), 62–83. See note 29.
34.William Loader, Sexuality and the Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 251.
35.Leander E. Keck, The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke-John (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 389–390.
36.Many others agree that what Jesus is rejecting here is the reduction of human hope to the sort of immortality aimed at in levirate marriage through the production of heirs. See Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 422, and Luke T. Johnson, Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1991), 318.
37.Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1997.)
38.For example, Williamson, Mark, 224.
39.Matthew 22:23–33.
40.Consider the stories about the Vineyard (Matthew 21:33–46), the Great Banquet (Matthew 22:1–14), and the joyous Wedding Feast (Matthew 25:1–13). Images of the Messiah as Bridegroom abound in the New Testament. See 2 Corinthians 11:2, John 3:29–30, Revelation 19:6–9 and Ephesians 5.
41.Interestingly, John Milton portrayed the unfallen angels as engaging in a purified and spiritual form of sex in Paradise Lost (8.612–629), suggesting that sexual intercourse would be part of life in the age to come.
42.Such a conclusion is already deeply embedded in the Orthodox Christian theology of marriage.
43.In Matthew 22:23–30 (and its parallels Mark 12:18–25 and Luke 20:27–36) the word frequently translated as “marry” is gamousin, the third-person form of gameó, which means to enter into the state of marriage, to wed, or to get married. It clearly refers to an action at a point in time, not to a vocational state of being. In English, we would say “he/she/it marries.” The second term in the verse, “giving in marriage,” is gamizontai. This is an alternative way of saying the same thing, with the connotation that one is doing it for one’s own benefit. In 1 Corinthians 7:33 we find the phrase that describes a married person: gamésas. Jesus Christ is not reported as using this term.
44.Dennis P. Hollinger, The Meaning of Sex (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Books, 2009), 90.
45.Smedes, Sex for Christians, 22; interpolation is mine.
46.J. Harold Ellens, Sex in the Bible: A New Consideration (Westport: Praeger, 2006), 46. Along these same lines, see Richard McCarty’s article on “Eschatological Sex,” Theology and Sexuality 19/2 (2013): 163–178.
47.Hays, First Corinthians, 279. This is reminiscent of the theo-logical claim noted earlier in chapter 1 by Ratzinger (see note 9 in chapter 1 in the present volume). Hays brings this same eschatological framework to his consideration of homosexuality in an essay entitled “Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies: The Witness of Scripture Concerning Homosexuality,” in Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate, ed. Jeffrey S. Siker (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 3–17. While I disagree with Hays’s conclusions about homosexuality in that essay, I want here to affirm his recognition of the import of bringing an eschatological framework to the consideration of questions in Christian sexual ethics.
48.Hays, First Corinthians, 252–282.
49.Ibid., 277.
CHAPTER 4. AUGUSTINE AND OTHER EARLY CHRISTIANS ABOUT SEX IN HEAVEN
1.The Apostles’ Creed may be the oldest of these. It has been variously dated from the second to the fourth century CE. It declares “the resurrection of the flesh.” The Nicene Creed from the fourth century confirms “the resurrection of the dead,” while the Athanasian Creed (from the late fifth or early sixth century) reaffirms that “all men [sic] shall rise again with their bodies.”
2.In her book Heaven, journalist Lisa Miller notes that all three Abrahamic traditions envision not merely the immortality of the soul but some sort of “resurrection” in which the righteous are ushered into a paradise with (at least something like) their bodies. In defense of this claim she highlights the explicit promise of heavenly sensual pleasures in Islam. She points out that Moses Maimonides in his twelfth-century Guide to the Perplexed made belief in bodily resurrection the last of his thirteen, nonnegotiable tenets of the Jewish faith. She admits, of course, that many Reform Jews today understand such convictions about the resurrection to be only metaphorical rather than ontological. Yet the matter is far from settled for Jews. While noting that in 1824 Reform Judaism substituted the notion of the immortality of the soul for physical resurrection, she points out that in the 2007 revision of its prayer book, the siddur, the Reform Movement reinserted the ancient avowal of bodily resurrection as an alternative reading (Miller, Heaven, 114). Of course, she cites the centrality of Easter to Christianity as evidence of the import of bodily resurrection to it (ibid., 63). She should also have cited the centrality of Advent with its annual reminder that “Christ will come again!” for Christians as well.
3.For a detailed historical account and constructive Christological analysis of early Christian eschatological perspectives on gender, see Benjamin H. Dunning, Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
4.In his Letter to the Smyrnaea (sometimes called To the Smyrnaeans and dated around 110 CE), Ignatius of Antioch (50–117 CE) defends the notion of Christ’s bodily resurrection against dualistic views. Brian E. Daley has identified several additional texts that contain comparatively unqualified affirmations of the hope for bodily resurrection. See Brian E. Daley, “Eschatology in the Early Church Fathers,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L Walls (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 91–109.
5.The Apostles’ Creed actually expresses faith in ressectio carnis not mortuorum or corporum. I note this to emphasize the radical nature of this claim. It entails assent to resurrection not just of the dead, or even of the body (soma or corpus), but of “the flesh” as we know it (sarx or caro). See Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 28.
6.As the interim—the time between the inauguration of the new age in Christ and its full arrival at the end of time—lengthens, this question about what happens to the faithful departed grows in importance. See pages 5–10 in chapter 1 for a discussion of related issues.
7.Earlier translations give the title as “On the Resurrection of the Body” or as “On the Resurrection of the Flesh.”
8.Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 43ff.
9.Tertullian, The Resurrection of the Dead, chapter 40, accessed August 10, 2011, www.newadvent.org/fathers/0316.htm.
10.Ibid., chapters 46, 49, 50.
11.Ibid., chapter 57.
12.Ibid., chapter 36. There was no longer any need (1) for the propagation of a people from whom the Messiah would come, or (2) to build up a sort of immortality based on “an heir and a spare,” or even more progeny, if possible. Christians had no need to pursue these ends either on earth or in heaven. Early church fathers apparently could not even imagine other purposes for conceiving and raising children!
13.Ibid., chapter 60.
14.Ibid., chapter 60.
15.Ibid., chapter 61.
16.Even before the later, fully Montanist phase of his life, Tertullian found little to celebrate in the human body. He opposed not only remarriage following divorce but also the remarriage of a widow following the death of a spouse.
17.Tertullian, The Resurrection of the Dead, chapter 61; interpolations and emphases mine.
18.Grace Jantzen, “New Creations: Eros, Beauty and the Passion for Transformation,” in Toward a Theology of Eros, ed. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 271–287.
19.It was in the Symposium (380 BCE) that Plato first introduced us to Diotima’s theory of love. In this account, desire for what is good and beautiful “progressed” from the vulgar lust for young bodies to the contemplative appreciation of ideas. In his Republic (375–370 BCE) Plato uncoupled “true” love from sexual activity, and in the Phaedrus (356 BCE) fleeting sexual pleasures were linked with weakness and drunkenness. For more detail, see Alan Soble, “A History of Erotic Philosophy,” The Journal of Sex Research 46/2–3 (March–June, 2009): 104–120.
20.Joanne E. McWilliam Dewart, Death and Resurrection: Message of the Fathers of the Church (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1989), 120; interpolations in original.
21.Segal, Life after Death, 571.
22.In general, the church in Alexandria emphasized the unity of the human and divine natures in the person of Christ, while accenting the divine nature of Christ. A bright side of their disdain for the particularities associated with embodiment was that most catechists from the school at Alexandria concluded that women (normally treated poorly because of their association with body) were not only fully human like men but made in the image of God. (They interpreted Genesis 1 in light of Galatians 3:28.)
23.Soble credits Clement of Alexandria with being among the first to declare that sexual acts in marriage were virtuous only if done for procreative purposes, and with recommending spouses minimize their pleasure by keeping their clothes on and proceeding as quickly as possible in the dark. See Soble, “A History of Erotic Philosophy,”109.
24.Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, book 6, chapters 13, 14, accessed August 11, 2011, www.newadvent.org/fathers/0210.htm.
25.Clement is quite clear that among our desires only “a wrongful and insatiable grasping after money” is forbidden by God. Clement of Alexandria, “On Marriage,” book 3, chapter 6, paragraph 56 in Miscellanies in Alexandrian Christianity: Selected Translations of Clement and Origin, ed. Henry Chadwick and J. E. L. Oulton (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1954), 66.
26.Ibid., book 3, chapter 12, paragraph 87, 81.
27.Ibid., book 3, chapter 12, paragraph 79, 76.
28.Ibid., book 3, chapter 6, paragraph 46, 62.
29.Ibid., book 3, chapter 5, paragraph 40, 58.
30.Daley, “Eschatology in the Early Church Fathers,” 98.
31.Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 66.
32.Bernard McGinn, “The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century,” The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991), 18.
33.Bernard McGinn, “Mysticism and Sexuality,” The Way Supplement 77 (1993): 53; my interpolation.
34.See Gregory of Nyssa’s dialogue with his sister, Macrina, in On the Soul and the Resurrection (written around 380 CE). Kindle edition.
35.Verna E. F. Harrison, “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies 41/2 (October 1990): 441–471. Here Harrison establishes that Gregory of Nyssa’s views about the place of sexuality in the life of the world to come are shared by his colleagues Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzen.
36.From a modern perspective one “upside” of Gregory’s eschatological speculation is that it grounded an egalitarian (relatively speaking) anthropology before God (if not on earth) and a single system of morality. Men and women within his framework had the same vocational ideals (albeit ascetic, monastic ones). They were to practice the exact same set of virtues. There were no double standards (including no harsher penalties for women, not even for sexual infidelity).
37.Christological controversies formed part of the backdrop to discussions about the resurrection of the body. This is evident in the theology of Dioscorus (d. 454). While he argued vehemently that Christ was truly human, in his view Christ’s humanity was—to put the matter delicately—simply not quite complete in all its parts. In other words, Jesus had no testicles. Dioscorus insisted the Incarnate Christ had no experience of seminal fluid or desire/lust. As he interpreted it, if Jesus was like us, tested in every way, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15), then he could not really have been sexual. Why? Dioscorus could not imagine an experience of sexual desire that would not prove to be inexorably sinful. He conflated desire with lust. See Harrison, “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” 469.
38.Virginia Burrus, “Queer Father: Gregory of Nyssa and the Subversion of Identity,” in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, ed. Gerald Loughlin (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007), 162.
39.Harrison, “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” 467.
40.Ibid., 469.
41.Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Celibate Bridegroom and His Virginal Brides: Metaphor and the Marriage of Jesus in Early Christian Ascetic Exegesis,” Church History 77/1 (March 2008): 1–25. See pages 21–22 for her discussion of this matter.
42.Jerome, Against Jovinianus, book 1, 36, accessed on June 11, 2015, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/30091.htm.
43.D. S. Wallace-Hadrill, Christian Antioch: A Study of Early Christian Thought in the East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See especially chapter 7 on “Antiochene Theology and Religious Life.”
44.John Chrysostom, “Homily 41 on 1 Corinthian 15: 35–36,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Saint Chrysostom: Homilies on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians (Volume 12), ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Talbot W. Chambers (New York: T&T Clark, 1984), section 250.
45.John Chrysostom, “Homily 31 on 1 Corinthians 12:21,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Saint Chrysostom: Homilies on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, section 182.
46.Clark notes in her essay “The Celibate Bridegroom and His Virginal Brides” that in his sixth homily on Colossians (2:12) Chrysostom argues that at the moment of death gender disappears. This is certainly a possible interpretation, but on the basis of the text it may be that only females disappear: “straightway you take into you the Lord Himself, you are mingled with His Body, you are intermixed with that Body that lies above, whither the devil cannot approach. No woman is there, for him to approach, and deceive as the weaker; for it is said, ‘There is neither female, nor male.’” Accessed August 11, 2012, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/230306.htm.
47.David G. Hunter, “Resistance to the Virginal Ideal in Late Fourth Century Rome: Case of Jovinian,” Theological Studies 48/1 (March 1987): 45–64.
48.Despite his popularity in both Rome and Milan, Jovinian was condemned as a heretic by Pope Siricius as well as Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. Hunter suggests that Jovinian’s stance against the supremacy of celibacy was untimely. It challenged Siricius’s effort to make celibacy a requirement for priestly ordination. He was also apparently quite undiplomatic, to say the least. He is known to have labeled as Manichean both Ambrose and Siricius.
49.This emphasis found expression in several important creedal formulas. A fifth-century CE creed from Gaul, misnamed Fides Damasi (Latin for “Faith of Damasus”), declared that we will be “raised on the Last Day in that flesh in which we now live.” The Council of Toledo declared two centuries later that “we will rise again … in this self-same flesh in which we live, exist and move.” In 1215 CE the Fourth Lateran Council declared that “all will rise with their own bodies, the bodies which they bear here.” See Ratzinger, Eschatology, 135–136.
50.Augustine, “During the Easter Season on the Resurrection of the Body against the Pagans,” (dated 411 CE) sermon 241, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, part 3: sermons/volume 7, trans. and notes by Edmund Hill, O.P. (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1995), 70–77.
51.Augustine, Of Faith and the Creed, chapter 10, paragraph 24, accessed August 27, 2011, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1304.htm.
52.Augustine, Confessions, book 8, accessed August 22, 2011, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.xi.html.
53.This interpretation of Augustine’s conversion is defended at length by Mark D. Jordan, “Flesh in Confession: Alcibiades beside Augustine,” in Toward a Theology of Eros, ed. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, 23–37 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). Others (in addition to Jordan) have reached similar conclusions about the anti-body nature of Augustine’s conversion experience. See Segal, Life after Death, 583. For this reason, Segal contends, Augustine purged heaven of all sensuous pleasures.
54.Augustine, Confessions, book 3, chapter 1, paragraph 1.
55.Ibid., book 8, chapter 11, paragraph 26.
56.Ibid., book 8, chapter 7, paragraph 17.
57.For a thorough analysis of this polemic, see David G. Hunter, “Helvidius, Jovinian and the Virginity of Mary in Late Fourth-Century Rome,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 1/1 (Spring 1993): 47–71.
58.See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 350. See as well Augustine, Confessions, book 9, chapters 3, 5.
59.Augustine, Confessions, book 9, chapter 3.
60.Ibid., chapters 10, 11.
61.David G. Hunter, “Reclaiming Biblical Morality: Sex and Salvation History in Augustine’s Treatment of the Hebrew Saints,” in In Dominico Eloquio—In Lordly Eloquence, ed. Paul M. Blowers, Angela Russell Christman, David G. Hunter, and Robin Darling Young (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 317–335.
62.Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, book 11, chapter 32 in St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 165.
63.Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, book 3, chapter 10, paragraph 16, accessed August 22, 2011, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/doctrine.xi_2.html.
64.Though I would not question Augustine’s assertion of sufficiency here, it strikes me as an odd quality to ascribe to life in glory. Trinitarian relations were undoubtedly sufficient yet God’s love overflowed into creation, and I find no compelling reason to presume limits to such (pro)creative extravagance in the life of the world to come.
65.Augustine, sermon 362, “On the Resurrection of the Dead,” The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, part 3: sermons/volume 10, trans. and notes Edmund Hill, O.P. (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1995), 241–265.
66.Augustine, City of God, book 14, chapter 3, accessed August 20, 2011, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120114.htm.
67.Augustine, Confessions and Enchiridion, trans. and ed. Albert C. Outler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), 392–393. (Or see any translation of The Enchiridion, 23:91.) The parenthetical translation ensouled underscores that the Latin term used here was animas, which translates soul.
68.Augustine, City of God, book 13, chapter 20.
69.Ibid., book 22, chapters 15, 21.
70.Ibid., book 22, chapter 21.
71.Ibid., book 22, chapter 29.
72.Ibid., book 22, chapters 17, 19, 20.
73.Ibid., book 22, chapter19; interpolation is mine.
74.Ibid., book 14, chapter 23.
75.Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser, “The Gender of Grace: Impotence, Servitude, and Manliness in the Fifth-Century West,” Gender and History 12/3 (November 2000): 536–551.
76.John C. Cavadini, “Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire,” Augustinian Studies 36/1 (2005): 195–217.
77.Augustine, City of God, book 14, chapters 10, 16, 26.
78.Ibid., book 22, chapter 17.
79.Ibid., book 22, chapter17. Women will be equal to men according to the virtues they have developed in history.
80.Ibid., book 22, chapter 29.
81.Ibid., book 22, chapter 30.
82.Ibid., book 13, chapter 22.
83.Augustine, Retractions, book 1, chapter 16, in Saint Augustine: The Retractions, trans. Mary Inez Bogan, RSM (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), 74–75.
84.Brown, The Body and Society, 424. This letter he notes was not discovered until the late twentieth century.
85.This translation of “Letter 6*” to Atticus of Constantinople is from St. Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality, ed. Elizabeth A. Clark (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1996), 104; interpolations mine.
86.Augustine, St. Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality, 86.
87.Augustine, Answer to Julian, volume 1/25 in Answer to the Pelagians, III: Unfinished Work, intro., trans., and notes Roland J. Teske, S.J. (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1999), 432. This too was the view espoused by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica. See III. Q. 14, a.4 and Q. 15, a.2.
88.Clark, “The Celibate Bridegroom and His Virginal Brides,” 18.
89.John E. Thiel, “Augustine on Eros, Desire and Sexuality,” in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 80.
90.While the sculpture can still be seen inside Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, the church has seen fit to keep Michelangelo’s rendition of Christ’s glorious genitals covered with a brass loincloth, which ironically, of course, draws even more attention to them.
91.Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 94–104.
92.Margaret R. Miles, “Sex and the City (of God): Is Sex Forfeited or Fulfilled in Augustine’s Resurrection of Body?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73/2 (June 2005): 308.
CHAPTER 5. REIMAGINING SEX IN HEAVEN
1.“So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.” 2 Thessalonians 2:15.
2.International Theological Commission, “‘Sensus Fidei’ in the Life of the Church,” (2014) 62. The publication of this document was authorized by the Vatican’s CDF. Accessed August 19, 2015, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20140610_sensus-fidei_en.html.
3.Ibid., 123; interpolation mine. The Vatican also specified in this document several spiritual dispositions that enable believers to enjoy this “sensus fidelium” (sense of the faithful). They include: active solidarity with the church, including but not limited to participation in the sacraments; listening to scripture, tradition, and the teachers of the church; openness to reason; peace and joy in the Spirit; and concern that one’s reflections serve to edify, rather than divide, the church.
4.Ibid., 80.
5.The relative weight of these criteria and the authority of each of these sources of moral wisdom, along with the exact nature of the interplay among them, are themselves hotly contested matters for Christians. Indeed, suffice it to say, that disagreements about precisely these matters may be at the very root of Christian disunity. Wandering further into this minefield will take us too far from the project at hand.
6.Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., Love Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994).
7.Ross, Extravagant Affections.
8.James D. Whitehead and Evelyn Eaton Whitehead, Holy Eros: Recovering the Passion of God (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009), 30.
9.See Dionysius the Presbyter, “The Divine Names in Pseudo-Dionysius,” The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999), 144. I am indebted to Orthodox philosopher Bruce V. Foltz’s (unpublished as of now) article entitled “Lessons from the River Oka: Toward an Icon of Marital Chastity” for this reference.
10.Wendy Farley, “Beguiled by Beauty: The Reformation of Desire for Faith and Theology,” in Saving Desire: The Seduction of Christian Theology, ed. F. LeRon Shults and Jan-Olav Henriksen (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 128.
11.Jensen, God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality, xi and 1–16.
12.Jan-Olav Henriksen, “Desire: Gift and Giving,” in Saving Desire: The Seduction of Christian Theology, ed. F. LeRon Shults and Jan-Olav Henriksen (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 21.
13.It is this tendency to conflate erotic desire with lust that makes what Friedrich Nietzsche claimed in Beyond Good and Evil—that “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it, but instead he degenerated into a vice”—a dangerous half-truth. It is easy—if nevertheless mistaken—to conclude that Christianity is “anti-erotic in its intentions.” See Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 137ff. The truth about Christianity’s evaluation of eros is far more complex.
14.Jensen, God, Desire, and a Theology of Human Sexuality, 1–17.
15.Ibid., 34.
16.Beguines were members of informal religious communities that developed as part of a Christian revival during the thirteenth century in northern Europe. They were comprised of lay men and women who did not take vows but who lived lives of voluntary poverty, taking care of the poor and sick, in imitation of Christ.
17.For a more thorough review of the literature on this topic, see Joey Gánio Evangelista, M.J., “Mechthild of Magdeburg and Human Sexuality,” East Asian Pastoral Review 45/4 (2008): 339–361.
18.This is to be distinguished from experiences of desire that stem from suffering lack.
19.Responding to a query from the Pharisees about which was the greatest commandment in the Law, Jesus replied: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37–40). This was not news to his audience. Such a command is found in the Hebrew Bible as well: “Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Love for neighbor and self were linked to this love of God in a similar way as well: “Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your own people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19:18). As Vacek reads this command, it is threefold, that is, it is a call to love God, neighbor, and self. This seems right to me as long as the notion of neighbor includes the cosmos. His vision of the interrelationship among these loves emphasizes the unity of these commandments.
20.See for example Ephesians 5:3–5; 2 Timothy 3:2–5; and James 5:5.
21.Philip Sheldrake, Befriending Our Desires (Ottawa: Novalis, 2001).
22.Roland A. Delattre, “Desire,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd. ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 2303–2309.
23.Henriksen, “Desire: Gift and Giving,” 29.
24.Ibid., 6.
25.Sebastian Moore, Jesus the Liberator of Desire (New York: Crossroads, 1989), 11.
26.Ibid., 28.
27.I am indebted here to the precision with which James Calvin Davis addressed an analogous question. See his humor-filled essay, “Will There Be Football in Heaven?” The Presbyterian Outlook 191/10 (March 23, 2009): 10–11.
28.C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: MacMillan, 1947), 191.
29.I would not adopt the dichotomous terms employed by either C. S. Lewis or William Blake in their infamous, if entertaining, debate about risen life. For more information about that debate, see William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.
30.Dorothy Day, “Aims and Purposes,” Catholic Worker 7/6 (1940): 7. For a detailed theological account of why this is so, see Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988).
31.For reviews of these developments, see Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Volume 2: Living a Christian Life (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1993), 558–569, and John Gallagher, “Magisterial Teaching from 1918 to the Present,” in Readings in Moral Theology No. 8, Dialogue about Catholic Sexual Teaching, ed. Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 71–92.
32.Second Vatican Council, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” 1965: 49, accessed August 19, 2015, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
33.Patricia Beattie Jung, “Intersex on Earth as It Is in Heaven,” in Intersex, Theology and the Bible, ed. Susannah Cornwall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 173–195; Patricia Beattie Jung and Joan Roughgarden, “Gender in Heaven: The Story of the Ethiopian Eunuch in Light of Evolutionary Biology,” in God, Science, Sex, Gender: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Christian Sexual Ethics, ed. Patricia Beattie Jung and Aana Maria Vigen with John Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 224–240; and Patricia Beattie Jung, “Christianity and Human Sexual Dimorphism: Are They Compatible?” in Ethics and Intersex, ed. Sharon E. Sytsma (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 259–270.
34.Miroslav Volf, “The Trinity and Gender Identity,” in Gospel and Gender: A Trinitarian Engagement with Being Male and Female in Christ, ed. Douglas A. Campbell (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 175.
35.This passage is generally accepted by biblical scholars to be a liturgical formula (referenced affirmatively by Paul) commonly used during baptisms in the early church. It has long been searched for insight into how sex (and other variations among the faithful) might be transfigured. In fact, Judith M. Gundry-Volf has argued that much of 1 Corinthians 7 (arguably the most significant biblical pericope on human sexuality) expresses Paul’s response to a debate among the early Christians in Corinth about how best to interpret Galatians 3:28c. See Judith M. Gundry-Volf, “Male and Female in Creation and New Creation: Interpretations of Galatians 3:28C in 1 Corinthians 7,” in To Tell the Mystery: Essays on New Testament Eschatology in Honor of Robert H. Gundry, ed. Thomas E. Schmidt and Moisés Silva (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 95–121.
36.Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008).
37.Herbert McCabe, What Is Ethics All About? (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1968), 68.
38.Patricia Beattie Jung, “A Case for Sexual Fidelity,” Word and World 14/2 (Spring 1994): 115–124.
39.Even those who carefully consider omnigamy note that “polyamorists have found ways to include additional relationships into their lives without lying to one another and destroying their primary relationship” (emphasis mine). Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray and What It Means for Modern Relationships (New York: Harper Books, 2010), 310.
40.John E. Thiel, “For What May We Hope? Thoughts on the Eschatological Imagination,” Theological Studies 67/3 (September, 2006): 517–541.
CHAPTER 6. TRANSFORMING SEX ON EARTH
1.Much of tremendous value has already been said about how principles associated with justice—like nonmaleficence and rules of consent, mutuality, equality, commitment, fruitfulness, and social justice, to name those articulated by Margaret A. Farley in her masterwork, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum International, 2006)—must serve as norms for sexual desires.
2.The story of King David’s ruinous attraction to Bathsheba can be found in 2 Samuel 11. The story of the sexual harassment of Susanna by much-revered judges is found in Daniel 13.
3.Deanna A. Thompson, “Hoping for More: How Eschatology Matters for Lutheran Feminist Theologies,” in Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist and Mujerista Perspectives, ed. Mary J. Streufert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 228.
4.Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 156.
5.Jo Ind, Memories of Bliss: God, Sex, and Us (London: SCM Press, 2003).
6.Diarmuid O’Murchu, M.S.C., The Transformation of Desire: How Desire Became Corrupted—and How We Can Reclaim It (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2007), 118.
7.Given its misuse, even “the pill” has a contraceptive failure rate over a five-year period of 35 percent.
8.Given human bipedalism and the lengthy time human infants remain helpless and require being carried, human mothers had to form bonds with some adults if they and their infants were to survive. See especially chapter 7 in Helen E. Fisher’s Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
9.Despite common myths to the contrary, sexual arousal and desire onsets long before puberty.
10.Traina explores the moral implications of the connection between good touch and human flourishing in the fifth chapter of her text entitled “The Right to Be Touched.” (See Traina, Erotic Attunement, 115–140.) Traina uses a Thomistic notion of flourishing in relationship to touch. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II. Q.141 a.6.
11.Many texts by Joan Roughgarden might be of interest in this regard. I would recommend Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Sexuality and Gender in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and the chapter on “Gender and Sexuality,” in Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 102–124. See also Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998), 228.
12.David A. Hogue, “The Desiring Brain: Contemporary Neuroscientific Insights into Pleasure and Longing,” in City of Desires—A Place for God? Practical Theological Perspectives, ed. R. Ruard Ganzevoort, Rein Brouwer, and Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Zurich: Lit Verlag GmbH, 2013), 51–61.
13.Ibid., 57.
14.For more detail, see James G. Pfaus, “Pathways of Sexual Desire,” Journal of Sex Medicine 6 (2009): 1506–1533.
15.John J. Medina, The Genetic Inferno: Inside the Seven Deadly Sins (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26.
16.For an extended discussion of various theories about how bodily sexual responses take social forms, see Judy Root Aulette, Judith Wittner, and Kristin Blakely, Gendered Worlds, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16–47.
17.According to the analyses of Ind, Sigmund Freud suggested that our libido can be traced back to the “memories of bliss” we experienced as suckling infants. For more information about this and related hypotheses, see Ind, Memories of Bliss.
18.Martha C. Nussbaum, “Constructing Love, Desire, and Care,” in Sex, Preference, and Family: Essays on Law and Nature, ed. David M. Estlund and Martha C. Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17–43.
19.This typology entered popular culture with the publication of the results of Alfred Kinsey’s studies beginning in the 1930s.
20.It is important to distinguish between descriptive and normative forms of relativism. It is absolutely right to avoid treating deviations from statistically “normal” experiences of desire as if they are automatically immoral. There is no fixed, “normal” experience of what is “sexy” for human beings. Every experience of sexual desire is “queer,” from one viewpoint or another. Indeed, one aim of “queer theory” is to encourage us to question the “normality” of all we take for granted.
And yet, despite evidence of the cultural and historical relativity in the experience of human sexuality, we can and ought to continue to make normative moral judgments about sexual desire and practices. Nussbaum argues rightly that we can still determine which experiences of sexual desire contribute to human flourishing in given contexts and, hence, determine which are morally good. We can identify what sorts of sexual desires and practices are (in)compatible with other values we hold dear, like equality and fairness among persons, economic productivity, friendship, and other types of love (filial, parental, and so on). But, she argues, when we recognize the cultural relativity of all erotic feelings, we are less likely to be ethically derailed by hegemonic, or excessively romantic, responses to what is familiar, or by phobic responses to what is strange. Furthermore, we are likely to regard even our best moral judgments as tentative and open to revision, should new information suggest their reconsideration.
21.This led many—most infamously perhaps Immanuel Kant—to conclude erroneously that we have no control whatsoever over our feelings.
22.For another text that takes a similar approach to emotion, see Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtue (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2007).
23.Beverly Wildung Harrison, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 36 (1981): 41–57.
24.In contrast, Nussbaum notes that the ancient Greeks and their eastern Indian neighbors viewed erotic desires as dangerous, that is, as having a terrible potential to entrap people. See Nussbaum, “Constructing Love, Desire and Care.”
25.This is not an altogether modern idea. Though they did not understand desire to be socially constructed over time across generations as we now do, the Stoics of the late first century of the Common Era understood desire to be within a person’s power at least to moderate.
26.So, though it may be true that some feelings can be encouraged by acting in conformity with them, this strategy most likely will not work in regard to altering one’s fundamental experience of sexual desire.
27.Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious Ethical Inquiry (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 5.
28.On October 24, 2009, a fifteen-year-old Richmond High School girl was gang-raped by several males in the presence of twenty or more bystanders at her homecoming dance in northern California. These bystanders did nothing but look on for more than two hours.
29.For an interesting psychological account of our capacity to learn to delay the gratification of spontaneous desires, see Walter Mischel’s The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (New York: Little, Brown, 2014).
30.The particular sexual obligations of any individual will vary in accord with the culture in which their experience of sexuality has been shaped and with their personal sexual histories. To state the obvious, the capacity of a fifteen-year-old who has been gang-raped to (re)educate his or her sexual affections might well be so gravely inhibited by that trauma that healing might well find its first expression in a “healthy” absence of desire.
31.This unresponsiveness to command may well have been what convinced Augustine that all sexual feelings and pleasures were morally problematic and led him to conflate all experiences of sexual desire with lust.
32.Traina, Erotic Attunement.
33.Nussbaum, “Constructing Love, Desire and Care.”
34.Marie M. Fortune, Love Does No Harm: Sexual Ethics for the Rest of Us (New York: Continuum, 1995).
CHAPTER 7. CULTIVATING SEXUAL DESIRE
1.Joan H. Timmerman, The Mardi Gras Syndrome: Rethinking Christian Sexuality (New York: Crossroads, 1984).
2.Christine E. Gudorf, “Why Sex Is So Good for Your Marriage,” U.S. Catholic 57/11 (November 1992): 6.
3.Harrison, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love.” Also see Andre D. Lester’s The Angry Christian: A Theology for Care and Counseling (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).
4.It is mistaken, of course, to conclude that because it will be left behind in our life to come, there is no need to cultivate now on earth that which has no future. For some who find themselves numbed by various expressions of what Walter Brueggemann has labeled “Royal Consciousness” the energizing force of prophetic anger is life giving. See Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).
5.This blessing was clearly not designed to be a bond that closes couples off from either God, neighbor, or the rest of creation. It is important to note here that this “clinging” is not equivalent to seeking control over or an unhealthy dependence on each other. In the life to come, we will have to “let go” of any idolatrous sexual relationships and have these partnerships healed of any aspects that do not strengthen us for communion with all that is.
6.“If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married” (Deuteronomy 24:5).
7.It is interesting to note that the tradition was quite clear early on about the need for the practice of sexual abstinence within marriage to be mutual. In contrast, only relatively recently has the church taught clearly that sexual activity within marriage likewise requires mutual consent.
8.Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II. Q.153 a.3.3, accessed October 12, 2014, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3153.htm#article3.
9.Christine E. Gudorf, “Sexual Pleasure as Grace and Gift,” The Other Side 34 (May/June 1998): 13. For an extended analysis of this, see also Christine E. Gudorf, Body, Sex and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1994), 81–138.
10.Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., “Orthodoxy Requires Orthopathy: Emotions in Theology,” Horizons 40/2 (December 2013): 219.
11.Though I will argue strongly for the cultivation of sexual desire, I am inclined to challenge the idea that penetrative sex is requisite for sharing pleasure, whether one is male or female, heterosexual or homosexual. While I would not rule out the treatment of erectile dysfunction with drugs like Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, among others, I do not think my argument sanctifies their widespread adoption.
12.Howard L. Harrod, “An Essay on Desire,” Journal of the American Medical Association 289/7 (February19, 2003): 813–814.
13.All, not just females, who are trafficked routinely do this because their “johns” (like all of us) find it exciting to be perceived as attractive and adept lovers. This is part of the “illusion” for which they are paying.
14.Breanne Fahs, Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women’s Erotic Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
15.Ibid., 25.
16.We have discussed the social construction of sexuality extensively in the previous chapter, so here I would only draw your attention to other key contributors to our understanding that nothing about sexuality exists outside of its social interpretation. For historical perspectives on this argument against biological essentialism, see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf Books, 1953) and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge Press, 1990).
17.Instead of being a consequence of socialization, some evolutionary biologists want to argue that males have an innately stronger sex drive, but this is highly contested. Many scientists believe women are not innately less interested in making sexual contact. They are just socialized to be so. Primate studies for example show females to initiate sexual activity on a par with males.
18.E. O. Laumann, A. Nicolosi, D. B. Glasser, A. Paik, C. Gingell, E. Moreira, T. Wang for the GSSAB Investigators Group, “Sexual Problems among Women and Men Aged 40–80: Prevalence and Correlates Identified in the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors,” International Journal of Impotence Research 17/1 (February 1, 2005): 39–57.
19.E. O. Laumann, A. Paik, and R. C. Rosen, “Sexual Dysfunction in the United States: Prevalence and Predictors,” Journal of the American Medical Association 281/6 (February 10, 1999): 537–544.
20.Fahs, Performing Sex, 119.
21.A. Nicolosi, E. O. Laumann, D. B. Glasser, E. D. Moreira, Jr., A. Paik, C. Gingell (Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors Investigators Group), “Sexual Behavior and Sexual Dysfunctions after Age 40: The Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors,” Urology 64/5 (November 2004): 991–997. These statistics include the growing rate of erectile dysfunction with real (as distinct from virtual) sexual partners among younger men, which is skyrocketing in correlation with their use of internet porn, a problem that will be examined in the next chapter.
22.Daniel Bergner, “Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That,” New York Times Magazine (May 26, 2013): MM22. For more information, see his What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2013).
23.Nancy E. Avis, Sarah Brockwell, John F. Randolph, Jr., Shunhua Shen, Virginia S. Cain, Marcia Ory, and Gail A. Greendale, “Longitudinal Changes in Sexual Functioning as Women Transition through Menopause: Results from the Study of Women’s Health across the Nation (SWAN),” Menopause 16/3 (2009): 442.
24.Stuart N. Seidman and Steven P. Roose, “The Sexual Effects of Testosterone Replacement in Depressed Men: Randomized, Placebo-controlled Clinical Trials,” Journal of Sexual Marital Therapy 32/3 (May–June, 2006): 267–273.
25.Kornrich Sabino, Julie Brines, and Katrina Leupp, “Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” American Sociological Review 78/1 (2013): 26–50.
26.Marie M. Fortune, Love Does No Harm: Sexual Ethics for the Rest of Us (New York: Continuum, 1995), 128–138.
27.Marvin M. Ellison, Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 76–93.
28.J. Bancroft, J. Loftus, and S. J. Long, “Distress about Sex: A National Survey of Women in Heterosexual Relationships,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 13/3 (2004): 193–208.
29.J. L. Shifren, B. U. Monz, P. A. Russo, A. Segretti, and C. B. Johannes, “Sexual Problems and Distress in U.S. Women: Prevalence and Correlates,” Obstetrics and Gynecology 122/5 (2008): 970–978.
30.John Bancroft, “The Medicalization of Female Sexual Dysfunction: The Need for Caution,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 31/5 (2002): 451–455.
31.Leonore Tiefer, Sex Is Not a Natural Act (Boulder: Westview, 2004).
32.Fahs, Performing Sex, 132.
33.Of course, living chastely requires that a person sometime practice some degree of sexual restraint. Depending upon whether the person is married, single, or living in community as a vowed religious, the Christian may practice temporary or perpetual abstinence from genital activity with all or some people. For example, traditionally chastity fosters fidelity among Christian spouses, inviting them to order their sexual desires in genitally exclusive as well as steadfast ways.
34.Gudorf, “Sexual Pleasure as Grace and Gift,” 12.
35.Keith Graber Miller, “Sex without Shame,” Sojourners 38/9 (September–October, 2009): 23.
CHAPTER 8. PORNOGRAPHY AND THE EDUCATION OF SEXUAL DESIRE
1.Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007), 184.
2.Farley, “Beguiled by Beauty: The Reformation of Desire for Faith and Theology,” 129.
3.Christine Roy Yoder, “The Shaping of Desire in Proverbs 1–9,” in City of Desires—A Place for God? Practical Theological Perspectives, ed. R. Ruard Ganzevoort, Rein Brouwer, and Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Zurich: Lit Verlag GmbH, 2013), 148–163.
4.Jensen, Getting Off, 162.
5.I really don’t want to plunge into this debate and spend the rest of this chapter arguing about this issue. In many ways I believe this particular topic has been worked to death by theologians of my generation from North Atlantic countries. Additionally, it would appear to be an understatement to suggest that this horse has already left the barn in many contexts. For example, most Christians in North Atlantic countries not only practice contraception but do so in good conscience. For a good overview of this, see Peter Steinfels, “Contraception and Honesty: A Proposal for the Next Synod,” Commonweal 142/10 (June 1, 2015): 12–19.
But I do feel obliged to lay my cards on the table about this matter. I don’t believe a scriptural case can be made for this particular cluster of teachings. Furthermore, I do not believe it can be established as a matter of natural law. I believe the nature of the link between sexual and reproductive activities varies considerably between men and women. When this variation is taken seriously, the claim that there is an “inseparable connection” between love making and baby making does not appear to be normatively human, but merely normatively male.
What do I mean when I assert that this claim is androcentric? Consider the connection between sexual desire and reproduction for men. Among the many human sexual activities, vaginal/penile intercourse alone is potentially reproductive. Let me be frank: coitus requires an erect penis. Desire and pleasure are prerequisite for male erection. In men, orgasm and ejaculation are simultaneous. So, reproduction requires that men sexually enjoy the activity. This is not the case for women. Furthermore, though sperm count and motility decline with age, if they do not suffer from ED, most men have the potential to procreate through coital activity until death.
In contrast, female desire, pleasure, and orgasm have no necessary connection to coital activity at all. Neither ovulation nor fertilization are linked to female orgasm. For women, the natural connection between sexual pleasure and reproduction appears to be far more tenuous. It is at most periodic, and then, only for a season of a woman’s sexual life. It is noteworthy as well that the clitoris is not anatomically located in a manner that particularly commends coital over other sexual activities. Furthermore, healthy women from developed countries expect to enjoy sexual desire and pleasure for some thirty years on average after they have completely lost the potential to procreate. When we consider women’s bodies and women’s experience when thinking about what might be normatively human, it is clear (to me at any rate) that it is perfectly natural for sexual activity to not even be potentially procreative.
6.Farley, Just Love, 204.
7.Ibid., 196.
8.Ibid., 215ff.
9.Sharing pleasure does not require multiple, simultaneous, mutual and/or even one orgasm, though these all could be included. When I talk about sharing pleasure, I am talking about attending to whether sexual activity is mutually joyful and erotically sensuous.
10.Farley, Just Love, 204–232.
11.For example, consider mid-twentieth-century Roman Catholic Church teachings in this regard. They broach the subject of sexual pleasure in marriage only very briefly. Pope Pius XI in his 1930 encyclical “On Christian Marriage” (Casti connubii) did note that spouses have the right to use the marital act to procreate and that it may cultivate marital love (59). Accessed August 19, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii.html.
Two decades later, Pope Pius XII confirmed that spouses do no wrong when they seek and enjoy pleasure as long as this is subordinated to the generation and education of children (70). He dismissed as unduly hedonistic and unnecessary any need for spousal education in this regard however. See Pius XII, “Address to the Italian Catholic Society of Midwives,” Acta Apostolicae Sedis 43 (October 29, 1951): 845–846, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/documents/AAS-43-1951-ocr.pdf.
12.Verlee A. Copeland and Dale B. Rosenberger, Sex and the Spirit: The Romance of Heaven and Earth (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2014).
13.For an in-depth analysis of this evangelical literature, wonderful for its attention to the different nuances expressed across various evangelical subcultures, see Amy DeRogatis’s Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
14.Christiane Northrup, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing (New York: Random House, 2010), 246.
15.It goes without saying that domestic forms of sexual violence will not be unitive. And yet, in many cultures—including North America—rape at the hands of one’s current or former intimate partner remains epidemic. Still, there is little explicit church teaching or preaching about unwanted, coerced sex within marriage or other forms of committed partnerships. For an analysis of the social construction of (heterosexual) rape, see Nicola Gavey, Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (New York: Routledge, 2005).
16.Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” was originally delivered as the 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address in London to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in 1989, accessed August 20, 2015, http://www.igreens.org.uk/bodys_grace.htm.
17.James A. Baldwin, “Interview,” first published in The Advocate and excerpted in the Utne Reader (July/August 2002): 100.
18.Ola Sigurdson, “The Passion of Christ: On the Social Production of Desire,” in Saving Desire: The Seduction of Christian Theology, edited by F. LeRon Shults and Jan-Olav Henriksen (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 31–54.
19.Though she does not address the issue of sexual desire, Tina Rosenberg discusses analogous kinds of issues in her book Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
20.Farley, Just Love, 225.
21.Ibid.
22.One concern I have about my focus on internet pornography is its emphasis on videos and what materials it leaves “off the table.” It is I believe important to ask whether some popular “romance” (or as they are sometimes called “beach”) novels might not also be pornographic. On the one hand, they often challenge rigid sexist stereotypes and treat domestic and sexual violence as negative, in the spirit of their literary archetype, Jane Eyre. On the other hand, they are infused with themes of eroticized bondage, control, and coercion. Admittedly, the degree to which these narratives are explicitly sexual varies considerably. But as the recent blockbuster book series Shades of Grey makes clear, they may increasingly share both the narratives and explicitly sexual features characteristic of pornography.
23.I first read of this in a short, editors’ “Century Marks” paragraph entitled “Repressed Desires?” Christian Century 131/23 (November 12, 2014): 9. It referenced the following study: Cara C. Macinnis and Gordon Hodson, “Do American States with More Religious or Conservative Populations Search More for Sexual Content on Google?” Archives of Sexual Behavior 44/1 (January 2015): 137–147.
24.Amy Frykholm, “Pastors and Pornography: Addictive Behavior,” Christian Century 124/18 (September 4, 2007): 20–22.
25.Jane M. Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 165.
26.Chiara Sabina, Janis Wolak, and David Finkelhor, “The Nature and Dynamics of Internet Pornography Exposure for Youth,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 11/6 (December 2008): 691.
27.Regrettably, social scientists appear reluctant to make the sort of normative judgment between erotica and porn I have been commending. In the studies cited later all sexually explicit materials are labeled porn.
28.Gary Wilson, “The Great Porn Experiment,” accessed November 24, 2014, http://www.singjupost.com/gary-wilson-discusses-great-porn-experiment-transcript/2/.
29.Simon Louis Lajeunesse and J-M. Deslauriers, “Point de vue Masculin sur la Pornographie: des Fantasmes à la Réalité,” Sexologies 22/1 (2013): 32–41.
30.I am indebted to a graduate student of mine who taught me that for most men neither masturbation nor pornography can be evaluated apart from each other. There are, of course, individuals (including recovering sex addicts) who do masturbate without porn.
31.Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 147. Ussher notes that the first use of the term pornography emerges in English with the discovery of the artifacts at Pompeii and the decision to hide these materials away in a secret museum in Naples when they were first uncovered.
32.Jensen, Getting Off, 53ff.
33.A brief word needs to be said about the many moral problems surrounding the production and regulation of porn. In addition to the blatant evils linked to the creation of child pornography and snuff films, there are a myriad of questions that arise about the validity of the consent offered by the men and women who “star” in the production of adult porn. There is the interaction between this industry and other forms of sex trafficking (such as prostitution and sexual slavery). There is a question about whether there is something inherently immoral about all forms “sex work,” that is, about the commodification and marketing of human sexuality (just as some have argued there is something morally problematic about buying and selling other aspects of human embodiment like the use of one’s womb, organs for transplant as well as the sale of infants and slave labor). There are also questions about whether the production of certain forms of pornography involve so much abuse of the adults involved that adult productions (like child porn and snuff films) should simply be declared illegal. As Marie Fortune notes, it may be “possible to imagine non-exploitative erotica in which women (and men) are not humiliated and victimized for the entertainment of others,” but the burden of proof in this regard rests with those involved in such productions if one is committed minimally to doing no harm. See Fortune, Loves Does No Harm, 125.
There are also questions about whether additional legal forms of censorship could be effectively enforced. There is some evidence that broader forms of prohibition would simply drive more products and people into the “deep web.” To give you a sense of the spectacular growth of the cybersex industry so you can consider the economic forces at play here, note that in 1998, N2H2 (a global internet filtering company) reported approximately fourteen million pages of porn on the internet. In 2010 it identified over four hundred million pages. These are just of few of the many important ethical issues linked to the production and public regulation of the porn industry that warrant careful consideration.
34.Ellison, Erotic Justice, 76.
35.Jane Caputi, “Everyday Pornography,” in Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean McMahon Humez (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2006), 434.
36.Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 153.
37.Ibid. Here Ussher was quoting from the introduction to Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh’s Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate (London: Virago, 1992), 6.
38.Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 171. Here Ussher references the Meese Report. See Henry E. Hudson, Diane D. Cusack, Park Elliot Dietz, James Dobson, Bruce Ritter, Frederick Schauer, Deanne Tilton-Durfee, Judith V. Becker, Ellen Levine, Edward J. Garcia, Tex Lezar, and Alan E. Sears, Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Final Report, July, 1985: 901–1033, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000824987.
39.Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity. Here Ussher references the work of psychologists Dennis Howitt and Guy Cumberbatch in Pornography: Impact and Influences (London: Home Office Research and Planning Unit, 1990).
40.Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 168.
41.Ellison, Erotic Justice, 129. For more discussion of this point, see Sylvia Thorson Smith, Pornography: Far from the Song of Songs (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church USA, 1988).
42.Howitt and Cumberbatch, Pornography: Impact and Influences, 30–40.
43.Paul J. Wright, “A Longitudinal Analysis of U.S. Adults’ Pornography Exposure: Sexual Socialization, Selective Exposure, and the Moderating Role of Unhappiness,” Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 24/2 (2012): 67.
44.Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity, 180.
45.Dylan Stein, Richard Silvera, Robert Hagerty, and Michael Marmor, “Viewing Pornography Depicting Unprotected Anal Intercourse: Are There Implications for HIV Prevention among Men Who Have Sex with Men?” Archives of Sexual Behavior 41/2 (2012): 411–419.
46.Clearly, in the past porn did not eroticize sexual encounters in which condoms were employed, though this may be changing at least for “above ground” productions. In California, recent law now requires the use of a condom during video takes.
47.Jensen, Getting Off, 178.
48.Andreas G. Philaretou, Ahmed Y. Mahfouz, and Katherine R. Allen, “Use of Internet Pornography and Men’s Well-being,” International Journal of Men’s Health 4/2 (2005): 149–169.
49.J. Michael Bostwick and Jeffrey A. Bucci, “Internet Sex Addiction Treated with Naltrexone,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 83/2(2008): 226–230.
50.Joyce Ann Mercer, “Virtual Sex, Actual Infidelity? A Practical Theological Inquiry into (Dis)Embodied Desire and Cybersex,” in City of Desires—A Place for God? Practical Theological Perspectives, ed. R. Ruard Ganzevoort, Rein Brouwer, and Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Zurich: Lit Verlag GmbH, 2013), 73.
51.Hogue, “The Desiring Brain,” 58. Hogue cites the work of neuroscientist David J. Linden, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning and Gambling Feel So Good (New York: Viking, 2011).
52.Fahs, Performing Sex, 273.
53.Lori Gottlieb, “Sexless but Equal,” New York Times Magazine (February 9, 2014): 32.
54.Sigurdson, “The Passion of Christ: On the Social Production of Desire,” 44.
55.Sigurdson suggests those seeking more information about this “visual” turn in the West should see Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999).
56.Richard Kearney, “Losing Our Touch,” Sunday Review New York Times, August 31, 2014, 4. See as well Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, eds., Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
57.According to their study of over 1,500 eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old men, Michael Malcolm and George Sami Naufal found not only a strong correlation between pornography use and a decline in their marriage rates but what appears to be a causal relationship, which suggests the sexual gratification associated with internet porn use functions as an alternative to marriage. See Michael Malcolm and George Sami Naufal, “Are Pornography and Marriage Substitutes for Young Men?” IZA Discussion Paper No. 8679, posted December 6, 2014, available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2534707.
58.Farley, Just Love, 225.
59.I was privileged to hear Father Ted Curtis make such a suggestion from the pulpit while serving as the rector at Grace Episcopal Church Chicago.