Flee fornication. Every sin that a man
doeth is without the body; but he that committeth
fornication sinneth against his own body. —1 Corinthians 6:18 (KJV)
This, and scripture like it, is the gold standard of the
church's teaching regarding celibacy before marriage. Here is
the same verse in context:
Your bodies are created with the same dignity as the Master's body. You wouldn't take the Master's body off to a whorehouse, would you? I should hope not. There's more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, "The two become one." Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever - the kind of sex that can never "become one." There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for "becoming one" with another. Or didn't you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? Don't you see that you can't live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body. —1 Corinthians 6:15-20 (The Message)
The
Rule
The Apostle Paul, in the above passage from I Corinthians, is
trying to explain to the new converts in Corinth why the routine
practice of hetero and homosexual intercourse with prostitutes
working at Corinth’s temple of Aphrodite violated not only their
relationship with the one true God in Jesus Christ, but violated
their own selves. During the Roman period the temple had more
than a thousand sacred slave-prostitutes, many of them young
girls dedicated to Aphrodite by their fathers or slave-owners.
In this passage, Paul does not mention marriage, neither is he
condoning casual, uncommitted sex or sex, in general terms,
outside the covenant of marriage. He is speaking to a specific
group of people who lived in a specific place at a specific time
about specific behavior—having sex with temple prostitutes. This is
true of virtually all of Paul's writing. None of it should be taken
at face value, as global or universal instruction, but rather it should
be studied and placed in proper historical and biblical context in
order to know not only what Paul said but why he said it, to whom
he was speaking, where that person was, and what was going on at the time.
I imagine most black churches today use I Corinthians 6 (“flee
fornication”) and other passages like it, mostly written by
Paul, as a foundation for our doctrine of celibacy before
marriage. They use the word “fornication” in its Catholic
(universal),
modern etymology to mean any and all sex before marriage, which
was not how the word was used in the archaic text. Much like the
word “knew,” which, in biblical times meant, “had sex with,” the
word “fornication” meant primarily sexual violations of the Levitical Holiness Code, where the word “fornication” is found
in more than a dozen iterations to mean specific sexual behavior
condemned by God (and, yes, there’s a list). If God meant “any
and all sex before marriage,” He would surely have said so. But
the bible never says that, anywhere in it. The church says
that, as a doctrinal conclusion. I have no argument with the
conclusion itself, but I maintain the church’s rationale for the
conclusion is faulty. It is taking scripture out of context and
putting words in God’s mouth by equating Paul’s pastoral
teaching with the unequivocal Word of God, which by the bible’s
own testimony, Paul’s writings are not (I Corinthians 7:SCR).
This misappropriation of scripture also deprives us of the
privilege of making a sacrifice of ourselves to God (Romans
12:1-2) by insisting celibacy is God’s standard, rather than our
gift back to Him. Proper doctrine teaches us God’s standard is
not celibacy. God’s standard is Holiness. In that context, what
we do or don’t do with our bodies matters a great deal, and it
refocuses the debate into a more coherent, Kingdom view of human
sexuality.
The rule, as everybody knows, is No Sex Until Marriage. Nothing I say
here is intended to undermine or eliminate The Rule but to
better and hopefully more accurately explain the scriptural
intent and provide a better rationale for Christian celibacy
than our simple Doctrine of Assumption. Most of us have no idea
whatsoever why The Rule exists, only that it does and, if we
violate it, we are going to Hell. That is precisely what I was
taught. No one opened a bible, no one showed me a scripture, no
one explained why God insisted on celibacy before
marriage—something He never asked of Adam and Eve or anyone else
in the bible. They just wagged a finger at me, warning, if I had
sex and died in my sin I would go to hell. Well, guess what? I
had sex. We all did. And many if not most if not all of us
suffered tremendous guilt and fear and even stigma around that
choice. Not because of anything the bible actually said but
because of Stuff We Done Heard Someplace.
In Matthew 19:11-12 Jesus says, “Not everyone can accept this
word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are
eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have
been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to
live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one
who can accept this should accept it.” Those who can.
That is a long way from a command or a Law. Some
scholars accept this as a commandment to celibacy for unmarried
persons. Others see this as Jesus describing sexual abstinence
as a precious gift we can offer God, “…for the sake of the
kingdom of heaven.”
In I Corinthians 7, the Apostle Paul spoke about marriage and
celibacy. It is a much different tone and carried a much
different intent from the previous chapter about prostitutes. To
Paul, marriage was a social obligation that had the potential of
distracting from Christ. For him, celibacy was the single life,
free from such distraction, not a life of saintly denial. Sex,
in turn, is not sinful but natural, and sex within marriage is
both proper and necessary.
“Now concerning the things of which you wrote to me: It is good
for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, because of sexual
immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman
have her own husband.” —I Corinthians 7:1-2 While not making a
specific statement or commandment, Paul is clearly referring to
sexual relations only within the covenant of marriage (which, in
biblical times, included multiple wives and concubines). He is
also speaking in monogamous terms—not “his own wives” but “his
own wife,” which represents a paradigm shift in terms of Jewish
tradition. There is no reference to polygamy in the New
Testament, which leads many scholars to suggest the practice had
been discontinued by the coming of Jesus. However, polygamy in
Judaism was still being practiced as late as 212 A.D., when the lex Antoniana de civitate gave the rights of Roman Citizenship
to great numbers of Jews, and it was found necessary to tolerate
polygamy among them.
Jesus taught a rather sexist Parable of the Ten Virgins, which is about
one
bridegroom and ten virgins. [Matt 25:1–13] This has been
interpreted by some Christian sects as a plural marriage.
Indeed, copyists of the New Testament manuscripts added “and
bride” to a number of manuscripts at the end of Matthew 25:1,
presumably because they were disturbed by the implications.
However, knowing that women in Antiquity often carried out
public functions as a group, it is possible that the virgins are
the bridesmaids. Even so, no single bride is mentioned in the
story and the group of ten virgins are acting in reference to a
single groom and not to a single bride.
Catholicism defines chastity as the virtue that moderates the
sexual appetite. Unmarried Catholics express chastity through
sexual abstinence. The view of the Church is that celibacy is a
reflection of life in Heaven, a source of detachment from the
material world which aids in one's relationship with God.
My argument, here, is to reframe the discussion from one of
legalism (this is God’s Law, violate it and you die) to one of
proper doctrine (we should remain pure so we can please God and
serve Him effectively).
