O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to save us.
Sometimes I'm reminded that I simply don't belong in our culture. Everyone in the world wants the same thing: Peace. But you can't get it unless, instead of aiming for peace, you aim for God. Goodness is something you can possess only by sharing it; as soon as you try to keep it for yourself, you don't have any. That's Augustine's City of God in a nutshell.
Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall is one of the best places I know to read about sex. And yet it's such an undervalued work among we Christians.
There, Bonhoeffer pits humans as imago dei, created in the image of God, bound to and guided by the Creator, against sicit deus, humans acting as if they were God. Sicit deus ignores humankind's inherent limits, doesn't depend on God and acts out of its own resources.
For Bonhoeffer, sexuality expresses this post-lapsarian sicit deus or denial of limits. In contrast, the world he imagines in the garden is asexual. Adam, the man, whose point of view Bonhoeffer identifies with and expresses, respects the physical limits of Eve. They can be naked together because Adam will never violate Eve's body.
Bonhoeffer expressly identifies the Fall as "the problem of sexuality". For after the Fall, Adam transgresses the boundary and wants to possess Eve's body. This "denies and destroys the creaturely nature of the other person". Thus, "sexuality is a passionate hatred of any limit" (Bonhoeffer's italics). Sexuality "lays violent hands on the other person" and "hates grace".
"Sexuality", Bonhoeffer summarizes, "[is] a perversion of the relation of one human being to another".
That's a shocker for those of us who've been shaped more by DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover than by the Bible.
In a Lawrence world, sex is a lot of things, but it isn't a "perversion" of the personal. For us, sex is essential -- it's such a part of being human that it's our very essence. It expresses a need, like food, that you simply can't deny. The "experience" alone is so "exciting" that you can't have "a good weekend" without it, much less be "happy".
It's no longer enough for a couple to be emotionally, spiritually or intellectually compatible. If they're really serious about each other they ought to discover whether they are sexually compatible too.
If two people love each other it's seen as natural for them to express that love through sex, regardless whether it makes a violent owning of the other.
While I'm left to affirm God's blessing of sex in Genesis 1.28, I have to ask if that blessing -- like all creation -- has been humanly warped into our own curse. With all the sexting, with the addictions to porn and sex that underlies so many relationships, sex now seems primarily a possessing of the other, rather than the other as a means of grace through mutual gifting and indwelling that echoes 1 Corinthians 7.
For that reason I think Bonhoeffer was right: "Sexuality is [has become?] a passionate hatred of every limit, it is arbitrariness to the highest degree, it is self-will, it is avid, unrestrained sexuality". And in that sense, it really is "uncreative sexuality", turning Genesis 1.28 on its head.
All of this is attributable to a great degree to the loss is shame (a la Freud). Bonhoeffer again: "Man's shame is his reluctant acknowledgement of revelation, of the limit, of the other person, of God. Therefore the preservation of shame in the fallen word is the only -- although a most contradictory -- possibility of acknowledging the original nakedness and the blessedness ["innocence", he adds in an editing] of this nakedness. This is not because shame is something good in itself…, but because it must give reluctant witness to its own fallen state".
"The sanctification of sexuality is given in its restraint by shame, i.e. in its covering and in the vocation of the restrained community of marriage in the Church."
A minister friend was recently telling me all about Tinder, the dating app. You swipe left to reject someone and right to accept them. He did the hand actions on an invisible phone. Then he said he worried that things like this are diminishing our humanity. His cheeks glowed with pleasure.
I blushed in shame.
Day and night I cry to you, my God. O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to save us.