Love, Sex and the Bible
by Rev. Colin Bossen, January 31, 2010
"Tell the Bible to stop oppressing me," my friend said one afternoon. She, a young radical feminist, was trying to encourage me to spend my time on something more worthwhile than my scheduled Bible study. She could not quite understand my interest in the text. Better, she thought, to read poetry, a novel or something that had a little more relevance to everyday life.
I, of course, tried to convince my friend that that the Bible was not out to oppress her. "It is just a text," I pointed out. "It does not oppress you," I argued, "people who misread it and misuse it do."
But I have to admit that there is something to my friend's statement. True, the Bible is just a text. But it is not just any text. It is a text that people use to order their reality. And it contains within it many passages that have been used, over the years, to oppress women and provide a veneer of authority and respectability to reactionary and misogynist agendas.
I cannot tell the Bible to stop oppressing my friend. I can, however, tell her and others who feel oppressed by it how to stop letting it oppress them. The key to this, and the key to the entire sermon this morning, is to remember that all of the texts of the Bible are products of cultures vastly different than our own. In comparison to our own these cultures were technologically primitive. Excepting the worlds of the elites, they were largely socially and economically homogenous. They held radically different views about the roles of men and women than we do. And to pretend that the cultural norms these cultures held around gender and sexuality are appropriate norms for our own culture is to miss the wide gap between our world and the world of the Bible. It makes no more sense to adapt biblical norms around gender and sexuality than it does to adapt biblical ideas about agriculture or accept biblical creation myths as scientific. Simply put, the sexual and gender norms of the Bible belong to a different time.
Unfortunately, many religious groups forget this. Instead they argue that the norms, as they understand them, of the Bible are appropriate for today. And in making this argument they often try to use texts that are as many as 3,000 years old to guide their actions in situations that the texts' authors could not have imagined. As a result they reinterpret the texts to mean something that they could not have meant in the texts original context.
Take, for example, the story of Judah and Tamar from which we read earlier. This story forms the basis for substantive portions of illiberal Christian sexual ethics. It has led the Catholic hierarchy to preach, and many conservative Christians to believe, that birth control and abortion are immoral. The claim is made that God killed Onan because the act of coitus interruptus is wrong, it denies the world of a potential human being. For this Martin Luther called Onan's actions "a most disgraceful sin...far more atrocious than incest and adultery."
Sex, we are told by such believers, is supposed primarily about procreation. Sex for other purposes or sex that does not allow for the possible creation of human life is understood to be immoral sex. Therefore, the modern heirs of Luther's position argue, birth control and abortion are wrong. They allow for sex to serve a purpose beyond reproduction and prevents the creation of new human life.
Such readings radically misunderstand the text. Instead of deriving values from it they import values into it. Understood within the context of the cultures of the authors of the Bible the story of Judah and Tamar has nothing to do with birth control. Onan's death is not brought upon because of his coitus interruptus. It is brought about because he refused "to provide offspring for his brother." He used coitus interruptus to achieve this. It was the end and not the means that God objected too.
Throughout much of ancient Israel there was something called the levirate marriage. The levirate marriage provided that if a married man died without leaving behind a son it was the duty of the man's male relatives--preferably his brothers--to ensure that he had a heir by marrying his widow and fathering a child with her. This provided the woman with a continued role in the household and obligated her family-by-marriage to take care of her. It also clarified inheritance laws. If the elder brother died before leaving a heir the levirate marriage ensured that male offspring that counted as his would inherit the major family property.
In Onan's case this meant that if he and Tamar were to have a male child together that child, and not any of Onan's other children, would automatically inherit the major share of Judah's property. Furthermore the child would be known as the son of Er, Onan's older brother, rather than as the son of Onan. In future histories and in future generations it would be Er that was remembered and not Onan.
Onan rebelled against this order. He did his duty and took Tamar into his household but he refused to have a child with her. Instead he spilled his seed. And for this God killed him.
When Judah realized that his first two sons had been killed after marrying Tamar he sent her away rather than let her marry his third son Shelah. Sure, he promised her that when Shelah came of age they would be wed. The text makes certain that he had no intention of following through on the arrangement. He was too afraid that, Shelah "too might die like his brothers."
Time passed. Tamar realized that she had been cast aside. Judah's wife died. Sometime afterwards Judah went out of town on a trip. Tamar got wind of Judah's journey and, knowing her father-in-law and his inclinations well, set a trap for him. She disguised herself as a prostitute. When Judah encountered her he decided to have sex with her. For payment he offered a kid from his flock. Tamar demanded that as an assurance Judah leave her his cord, his staff and his seal. Judah agreed--which is sort of amazing since his cord, staff and seal were the cultural equivalent of his social security number, credit card and drivers license--and they had sex.
Tamar became pregnant. Judah heard that she had "played the harlot." So he said "Bring her out...and let her be burned." But before she could be killed she produced Judah's staff, cord and seal thus proving that Judah was the father. When Judah realized what had happened he said, "She is more in the right than I..."
What are we to make of such a strange story? What does it tell us about biblical sexual norms? If anything it should suggest just how different they are than the norms of our own society. The society in which the story of Judah and Tamar is set is almost wholly alien to our own. Women were considered to be property. Judah could call for Tamar to be burned because she was in some very real sense his property. The allegation that she was playing the harlot was an affront to him. If not addressed it could threaten his entire line of succession and cast doubts upon the paternity of other children in his family.
In this Biblical world, women were not just property. They were property with a purpose. And their purpose was to generate progeny. Tamar was important because she was a fertile female who could be used to continue the family line. Throughout the story she acts in such a way to ensure that she will have children. When Judah fails to provide her with a legitimate mate she procures one, namely him, by trickery.
The authors of the Bible clearly did not disapprove of Tamar's behavior. She is one of King David's ancestors. So, if anything, her actions ensured the birth of Israel's greatest hero. It is unlikely that the authors of the Christian New Testament disapproved of her significantly either. Through David she is credited as being one of Jesus's ancestors.
There are those who would seek to recreate a world in which women exist primarily as property with a purpose. And it might be that that is the agenda behind many who turn to the story of Judah and Tamar to find some sort of Biblical sanction against birth control. By denying women access to birth control they would deny women the ability to control the size of their families. And sex would be, whatever other intentions behind it aside, largely about procreation. If this is the agenda of some who claim to use the Bible to establish sexual and gender norms it should be exposed as such. And we can reject that agenda for what it is, an attempt to oppress at least half of the human family.
Not everything in the Bible presents such an alien picture of sexuality. The earliest parts of Genesis seem to imply that part of being human is being sexual. As Genesis 1:27-28 reads: "And God created man in His image, in the image of God he created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them and God said to them, 'Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it...'" When humanity comes into the world humanity appears as a sexual creature.
The Song of Songs celebrates this sexuality in a way that might make the more prudish amongst us uncomfortable. The text is a sequence of love poems between two lovers--with occasional additional voices thrown in for narrative effect--that sometimes strays into graphic, metaphoric, detail. The lovers genitals are described in beautiful prose. The sex act itself is celebrated. The text seems to stand in contrast to the story of Judah and Tamar. Sex is not just about procreation. Sex is about communion with the other, communion with the lover. With such love, as the woman in the Song of Songs proclaims, "I am my beloved's / And my beloved is mine."
The Song of Songs make clear that such love can be transformative. It can cause the lover to see the object of his love, in the words of the man in the poem, as "she that shines through like the dawn, / Beautiful as the moon, / Radiant as the sun / Awesome as bannered hosts." Such comparisons place the lover on an equal level with God, she becomes an object of absolute adoration.
Reading the Song of Songs one quickly notices that God appears nowhere within the text. The poem is a celebration of human love. The personified divine is not present within it. This, along with the text's rather graphic descriptions, have led some religious commentators to argue that the text is not about sexuality at all. Rather it is about the relationship between God and Israel. Throughout the Bible God and Israel are frequently referred to as being married and, so the argument goes, the metaphor of sexual union provides an useful way to describe the intensity of the relationship between the two parties.
Though I am no real Biblical scholar such arguments fall flat with me. Reading the text it seems easier to accept it at face value, as a celebration of human sexuality and human love, than to develop some sort of complicated metaphoric reading of it. But then again, so often it seems that many interpreters of the Bible fear sexuality. Until we stray into the Christian New Testament this fear is not reinforced by the text itself. Rather it is something that some readers impose upon it.
So far I have focused on the portion of the Bible that Christians refer to as the Old Testament and that I generally call the Hebrew Bible. Like the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament contains many passages relating to sex and sexuality. And like the Hebrew Bible the Christian New Testament is a product of a culture very different from our own. The world of the authors of Christian New Testament was, like that of the Hebrew Bible, one that was highly patriarchal. Women were regarded as property and polygamy was common. Many of the norms for sexuality and gender that the Christian New Testament contains are as inappropriate for our culture as the ones found in the story of Judah and Tamar.
Indeed, the concerns of the authors of the Christian New Testament were different than our own. Examine a passage like 1 Timothy 3:2 which reads "A bishop, therefore, must be above reproach, husband of one wife..." or 1 Timothy 3:12 that reads "A deacon must be the husband of one wife..." The purpose of these passages is to discourage polygamy in church leadership. There was a fear that a leader in a polygamous marriage would not be able to give his full attention to his religious duties. Interestingly, the text says nothing about ordinary members of the congregation practicing polygamy. Since the practice appears to have been widespread in various biblical cultures--how many wives did David and Solomon have?--does this mean we should adopt it?
Paul's 1 Corinthians 7 lays out some of the clearest expectations for sexual behavior and relationships in the Christian New Testament. There is much within it that we might find familiar. There are statements about marriage uniting two people into one with Paul writing the words: "The wife cannot claim her body as her own; it is her husband's. Equally, the husband cannot claim his body as his own: it is his wife's." And there are admonishments against divorce. What is most striking about the text is that its author thought of sexuality as a distraction from the service of God. If one could choose between marriage and the single life, the single life was better because "An unmarried man is concerned with the Lord's business..." However, if one found sexual desire to be too intense it was better to marry than "burn with desire." Ultimately though all of this was not of primary concern because, Paul thought, "the time we live in will not last long" and "the world as we know it is passing away."
The idea of sex and human love as a distraction from serving God seems to run in contrast with the Song of Songs. Perhaps this is because 1 Corinthians and the Song of Songs are themselves the products of different cultures and periods of human history. This brings me to a final point. Just as the cultures that produced the Bible are different than our own they were different from each other. The concerns of a cosmopolitan globe trotter like Paul were not those of a nomadic shepherd like Judah or a monarch like David or Solomon. To pretend then that the Bible presents one unified set of teachings on gender and sexuality is to miss the complexity of the text. This realization should, in turn, expose the problematic nature of turning to the Bible as a place to discover sexual and gender norms.
If such norms must be found I prefer to seek them within the confines of our own Unitarian Universalist tradition. The authors of the Bible only represented a sub-set of human cultures. They had no conception of gender beyond male and female. There are certainly cultures that understand gender to be more complex than male and female. There are the Hijra in India and in North America there are some indigenous cultures who conceive of people who are "two-spirited," neither male nor female but sharing aspects of both. Perhaps as importantly the authors of the Bible did not have access to, or even the conception of, modern birth control technologies. The revolution in human culture and sexuality that these technologies allowed was simply beyond their keen.
Our Unitarian Universalist movement takes the complexity of human sexuality into account in its teachings about sexual relationships. Through our curriculum series "Our Whole Lives" we have sought to teach people that sexuality is an important of life and can be experienced in a diversity of ways and at a diversity of points in life. A recent article in Oprah's O magazine quoted Janet Hayes, a public relations official for the Unitarian Universalist Association, as saying, "Your sexuality doesn't end after you stop having babies or get divorced or after you turn 60. It is who we are in our core. We feel it has to be integrated into our spirituality because, for us, spirituality is about wholeness." "That's why we named our program Our Whole Lives," she noted.
This message of spiritual wholeness can be found in some parts of the Bible and it is foreign to other portions of the text. To the extent that it is present the Bible can serve as a work of uplifting literature that celebrates the fulness of human experience. To the extent that it denigrates women or marginalizes sex as secondary to human spirituality it should be challenged. For the Bible, and any other sacred scripture, is only as good it mirrors the blessing of our closing hymn: "My your life be as a song / Resounding with the dawn / to sing awake the light. / And softly serenade the stars, / Ever dancing circles in the night."
Amen