The conservative sexual ethic is founded on a simple idea – that sex is sinful outside of the sacred bonds of marriage. The argument is that God created monogamous heterosexual lifelong marriage to be the only place for sex. Consequently, any sexual activity outside of a marriage covenant constitutes porneia or sexual immorality and is sinful. And so serious is this sin that having sex outside of marriage could send you to hell where you will experience eternal conscious torment.

Unsurprisingly, this belief is scary and leads to a high degree of anxiety, scrupulosity, guilt, shame and control over one’s own sexuality. It is preached as though it is biblically uncontested, sometimes with a force that causes guilt, shame and religious trauma. Here is an example of how some evangelical pastors address pre-marital sex in their church. Warning: this can trigger trauma:

https://youtube.com/shorts/5qaMv6W5k9Q

The conservative sexual ethic is rule-based: the rules are lines drawn in the sand that show whether you are in or out of sin. Sex outside of marriage is out, sex in marriage is in.

And on one level the idea appeals – looking at the Genesis 2 and Genesis 4 stories of “one flesh,” where Adam is joined to his wife and “knows” her – yada – we see that connection, love, commitment and sexuality are all bound up in the first known example of a sexual relationship. Furthermore, we see Paul in Ephesians 5 talk about Christ and the church – being “one flesh” and again we see how marriage is idealised as a mutually sacrificial loving relationship where sex is at the heart of the intimacy and connection. Marriage is meant to be monogamous, between a man and a woman, and sex is part of the intimacy of that relationship.

To a modern Christian audience, this makes intuitive sense of those passages and it relies heavily on the idea of “one flesh” being a man and his wife. But this very simple sexual ethic is a historical construction that dates from well after the first century. The assumptions behind it came together over the course of the second, third and fourth centuries. In other words – this was not the mental map that Paul had when he was preaching and certainly not the ethic that Jesus preached. Jesus cited Genesis 2 when talking about divorce; he wasn’t addressing sex outside of marriage.

We need to be cautious too with these two images from scripture. Neither of them actually says that sex must be confined to marriage nor that sex outside marriage is itself sinful or sexually immoral. To say that they do is to read far more into the texts than they say. That is eisegesis: the imposition of a framework you want to believe onto the text itself. As we shall see, that framework was something that developed later in church history.

Neither does this construct stand up when you look at the Bible itself. The Bible is full of examples of men who had multiple wives, concubines and sexual relationships that simply don’t fit the conservative marriage-or-sin framework. Abraham, David and Solomon are obvious examples. And then there are the stories of Ruth, Esther and the lovers in Song of Songs, which hardly fit neatly into the conservative sexual rulebook we’re told God established.

Are we seriously expected to believe that God established exclusive monogamous marriage as the only legitimate place for sex, while the biblical writers repeatedly describe a very different world without consistently condemning these arrangements?

Even a brief review of the Bible shows how trying to retrofit a one-flesh, monogamous, sex-can-only-be-in-marriage ethic onto the rest of scripture fails to work.

This is where some of my subscribers will jump off. That’s fine. But I think we need to have the hard conversations and examine what we believe, why we believe it, and know where these ideas came from before we defend them.

But before we get into it, I want to be clear that in deconstructing the conservative sexual ethic I am not advocating a sexual free-for-all where “anything goes.” In chapter 8 of my book “The Yoke That We Were Never Meant to Bear – The Unfinished Reformation,” I set out an alternative sexual ethic that is harm-based rather than rule-based, sex-positive and founded on Paul’s teachings in Galatians. It allows for a more diverse range of sexual expression than the simple distinction between being married or not, but is more aligned with the freedom of the gospel than the conservative sexual ethic.

Porneia or “sexual immorality”

Paul and the other apostles had strong words for the church about the subject of porneia or sexual immorality. In Acts 15:22–29 the apostles send the gentiles a letter advising them to abstain from a few things, one of which was porneia. In my NASB Bible that is erroneously translated as “fornication” (sex outside of marriage) reflecting the common assumptions about the meaning of this word in mainstream conservative circles.

This was discussed in the last two articles – that when Paul was talking about porneia in the first-century world, it wasn’t the common understanding of the time that this simply meant “any sex outside of marriage.” That idea evolved over the subsequent centuries during a period when the church had taken a distinctly negative approach to sexual pleasure.

Three centuries before Christ, the meaning of the word porneia in ancient Greece was primarily that of prostitution. We know this because in the 3rd century BCE, Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Torah into Greek, producing the translation known as the Septuagint. They used the word porneia to specifically describe prostitution and Temple prostitution. ^[i]

As the Second Temple era went on, Jewish writers began to use it to describe a wider range of activities that were specifically banned in the Torah. This included – but was not limited to – adultery, rape, incest, marriage to a gentile, bestiality and same-sex intercourse. Some Jewish writers used the term more loosely than that to describe anything that they disapproved of, as did later church fathers. The broad meaning of the term in Paul’s day was most commonly understood to be this.

However, between Paul’s writings in the first century and Augustine’s writings of the fifth century, sex itself had become something spiritually suspect. In a strongly ascetic spiritual culture, influenced by Stoicism and Gnosticism, many of the early church fathers came to see sexual pleasure, not as a gift from God, but as sinful in itself, and something that a truly spiritual man should forego, even within marriage. There were some earlier precedents, but this became mainstream. Sex within marriage came to be considered a “venial sin” unless carried out for procreation^[ii]. In Chapter 17 of “On Marriage and Concupiscence (Book I)” Augustine says of couples who enjoyed sex while trying to avoid having children the following:

“Well, if both parties alike are so flagitious, they are not husband and wife; and if such were their character from the beginning, they have not come together by wedlock but by debauchery. But if the two are not alike in such sin, I boldly declare either that the woman is, so to say, the husband’s harlot; or the man the wife’s adulterer.”

Celibacy came to be promoted as the spiritual ideal and women came to be shunned as temptresses by the church fathers^[iii]. Porneia came to include not only sex outside of marriage but also having sex with one’s wife for pleasure rather than procreation, and sexual activities which couldn’t lead to pregnancy. One church father, Tatian, although strongly disavowed by other church fathers, went so far as to argue that even having married sex for procreation was porneia.

And one detail finishes the picture off nicely – that by the 4^th century such was the value placed on celibacy that the Council of Nicaea had to specifically ban anyone who had castrated themselves from becoming clergy!

Two good scholarly sources for the meaning of porneia are Dr Kevin Jenson’s work “Sacred Not Sinful,” and the work by Wheeler-Reed, Knust and Martin “Can a Man Commit Porneia with His Wife?” which both challenge the traditional definition of porneia. ^[iv]

Dr Kevin Jenson makes an interesting observation that the term porneia meant something broader than committing various illicit acts. It was used to describe a man being driven by his own appetites to do something shameful, which was beneath his status or dignity.

“The authors of the New Testament also extended the rhetorical significance of the word porneia. A person who gave their life over to indulging in their sexual desires would have been accused of porneia and dishonored in the Greek culture. In the emerging Christian culture, the idea of porneia was extended to give an example of any physical desire overcoming one’s sense of integrity or identity.

For example, the writer of Hebrews described Esau’s exchange of his birthright for a pot of stew using the word porneia. This man’s stomach had become more important than his life. He was out of balance or out of integrity with himself when he let his physical appetites govern his behavior. He abandoned the promise of God for the sake of gratifying an overwhelming physical desire for food. His actions were out of character, out of alignment, or out of integrity with his identity as one who carried the promise of God.”

Excerpt from Sacred Not Sinful Dr Kevin Jenson.

However, the point remains – porneia did not simply mean sex outside of marriage in the first century. Which means that this is not the core meaning of the term when the Bible warns us to avoid “sexual immorality.” A more accurate understanding would be to avoid sex with prostitutes – especially ritualistic idolatrous sex, avoid adultery, incest, same-sex relations and bestiality. One might add, don’t be governed by your appetites to do what is shameful or beneath you.

Adultery or Moicheia

Under the conservative sexual ethic, adultery consists of any sexual activity outside of the marital relationship. However, this also is a later development and was not the understanding or definition of adultery during the time of Jesus or Paul. Under Jewish law, adultery was the sin of taking a woman who belonged to another man. If a married man took an unmarried woman, this was not considered to be adultery. Roman law and Greek practice similarly reflected this asymmetrical and unequal patriarchal approach to adultery.

Jesus spoke about adultery, but he didn’t specifically extend the meaning to include unmarried women. In Matthew 5:27–28 Jesus condemns men who look at women with the intention of possessing them. The word he uses is gynē in Greek which can mean either woman or wife depending on the context. When Jesus spoke to a Jewish audience about adultery, which had a specific meaning – sex with a married woman who wasn’t your wife – one can but assume he meant a married woman.

Jesus, however, did reproach men who divorce their wives and remarry and said that they were committing adultery against their first wife (Mark 10:11-12). This indicates that adultery can go both ways, and is the first move in elevating women to the same status as men. But this – appearing in just one place – is a somewhat thin argument for stating that this was the new normal.

Paul also worked within the Roman world where Roman sexual permissions depended heavily on status; men enjoyed freedoms denied to wives, particularly and shockingly with prostitutes and enslaved people. But in 1 Corinthians 7:2–4 Paul makes a move towards greater equality – he talks about mutual obligations between a man and a woman who are living as if married or are married.

“But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.” (ESV)

Whilst this is a move towards a more equal status, it again falls short of setting a radical new standard and redefining the concept of adultery. After all, Paul also never rebuked the men of Corinth who used prostitutes for adultery, but for porneia.

The fact is that the older understanding of adultery remained influential, even among Christians, well into the fourth-century church. John Chrysostom challenges this in his sermon “Because of fornications every man shall have his own wife” where he acknowledges to a Christian audience that the common understanding is that a man is morally free of adultery if the woman is unmarried, but insists that it is indeed adultery. He builds on the 1 Corinthians 7:2–4 passage to make his case.^[v]

To read the word adultery in the New Testament as something that a man could do with an unmarried woman is to read a later concept anachronistically onto the text. It was not the understood meaning of the word in the first century.

But there is one passage we haven’t addressed yet, and it is arguably the strongest argument for the traditional sexual ethic. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul advises those struggling with sexual desire to marry rather than burn with passion. For many Christians, this settles the matter. Sex belongs within marriage, and Paul has said so.

But has he?

In the next article, we’ll take a deep dive into the Roman sexual world in which Paul lived and the problems he was addressing in Corinth. We’ll explore why his advice in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7 may not establish the universal prohibition on sex outside marriage that modern conservative Christians claim it does. This journey into Corinth is going to be fascinating and eye-opening.

The question is not whether Paul recommended marriage. He clearly did.

The question is whether his recommendation constitutes a timeless command that all sexual intimacy outside marriage is inherently sinful.


Endnotes:

^[i] https://discourse.biologos.org/t/porneia-vs-fornicatio/56568/5

^[ii] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/15071.htm Chapter 17

^[iii] “And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert — that is, death — even the Son of God had to die.”

Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women (De cultu feminarum), Book I, chapter 1, written around 200–206 CE

^[iv] https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/ceabb71c-c638-4d65-a290-fb9e0f6da4f6/content

^[v] https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?chunk.id=00000011&docId=Fathers-Synchronized-EN%2FJohn_Chrysostom__In_illud_Propter_fornicationes_autem_unusquisque_suam_uxore.en.html

The longer I look into Biblical texts pertaining to sexuality, the more I realise that we are no longer reading the same Bible that the writers thought that they wrote. Okay, yes, it is the same book in its original text – all the Greek is there, but we are just not reading the same things they said. The meaning has drifted significantly and this distorts our understanding of what God is condemning and what He is not condemning.

But it is actually much worse than a few stray translations over some difficult words; we have layered a whole bunch of meaning that never existed in the first century straight over the words we read – modern assumptions, modern concepts that would have been foreign to the writers. And not just that, they were operating in a world with concepts that are foreign to us too.

The problem is this – several ideas in the Greek — ideas such as shameful sexual behaviour, desire, human self-reliance, moral corruption, shameless excess — have been translated into English in a way that has lost the original meaning and reformulated them into a primarily sexual issue.

Let’s look at six Greek words that are mistranslated, misunderstood and which shift our entire understanding of the Bible towards a sexualisation of sin:

Epithymia or ἐπιθυμία – translated “lust”

Sarx or σάρξ – translated “flesh”

Porneia or πορνεία – translated “sexual immorality” or “fornication”

Akatharsia or ἀκαθαρσία – translated “uncleanness” or “impurity”

Aselgeia or ἀσέλγεια – translated “sensuality”

Kōmoi or κῶμοι – translated “orgies”^[i]

Some of the shifts in meaning are due to historical changes in how we see spirituality and sexuality that emerged well after the New Testament was written, and some are just bad translations. The first one is just a persistently bad translation choice – lust – the youth pastor’s best lexical friend!

Epithymia: lust

“Lust” in English is primarily sexual. Although we use the words “lust for life”, it primarily means strong sexual desire, being driven or controlled by sexual passions. The problem is that this is simply not the meaning of the Greek word it is trying to replace in the text - epithymia.

Take 2 Timothy 2:22-23:

“Now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels.”

This one is read out at youth groups but every young person in the room – understandably – hears that as “flee from the sexual desire and pleasure of your own body….”

This gets translated in young (and old) minds as – don’t touch yourself, suppress the erotic imagination, suppress your sexual feelings and avoid anything that might lead to arousal – e.g. spending time with a member of the opposite sex. Stay pure – don’t lust!

But this is a very misleading translation. Epithymia simply means an intense desire. It was used by Jesus when he said “I have longed to eat this Passover meal with you”. No one translates that as “I lusted to eat this Passover meal with you” but that is the exact same word.

So, when Paul uses the word epithymia to say flee the strong desires of youth, he is primarily talking about any general disordered desire. For example, the desire to control other people, ambition, power, money, popularity or high reputation. And yes, it could also include disordered sexual behaviour. But the choice of “youthful lusts” puts the meaning squarely on your youthful sexual desires.

Lust is one of those words that the American church uses pejoratively when it is talking about sexual desire. Sexual desire is not good – it is linguistically framed as inherently sinful. The problem with this is that when you characterise sexual desire as “lust”, you fail to distinguish between healthy and joyful sexual pleasure and desire, which are good, and disordered sexual behaviour. Disordered sexual behaviour uses people; it is harmful, unsafe and often out of control. Sex offenders or predators are just one example of this – they reduce people to objects of gratification for their own use. That is the sort of disordered desire that Paul is warning about.

Jesus warns in Matthew 5:28 that:

“Everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” NASB

The word he uses is ἐπιθυμέω (epithymeō). The word is the same one used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) when talking about adultery. Jesus also uses the word gynē, which in context means wife rather than woman.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” Exodus 20:17.

The same word means covet. Epithymia is not primarily a sexual word; it is a word for desire/covet. Moses obviously is not instructing the Israelites not to lust after donkeys.

So, a more accurate translation is actually the following:

“Everyone who looks at a married woman to covet her (i.e. with intention) has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”^[ii]

But because sexual desire is routinely treated as a “lust” problem, we have generated a culture of sexual guilt. A quick review of Christian social media threads suggests that most Christian teenagers are now under the impression that they have a problem of lust. And the kicker is that most Bible translations actually reinforce that impression. Let me show you how.

Sarx: the flesh.

“Walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” Galatians 5:16 NIV.

The word “flesh”, or sarx, has collapsed in our common Christian understanding into a quasi-Gnostic understanding of the word. The Gnostics believed that anything of the flesh was corrupt and sinful, especially sexuality. The body and the flesh were so corrupt that they could not accept that Jesus could have come in the flesh. The spirit was pure and good but the body and its desires were so corrupt and sinful that it was impossible to imagine Jesus having the same body and desires as us.

This sits in stark contrast to the Hebraic approach to the body in the Bible. In the Hebraic world of the Old Testament, eating, drinking and sexual pleasure were seen as good. The body was made by God and God said His creation was “very good”. Jesus, the logos, became flesh or sarx. Jesus was even criticised for coming eating and drinking instead of fasting.

Unfortunately, today most Christians have assimilated a quasi-Gnostic assumption about the body – that the “desires of the flesh” mean our sexual desires, and they assume that sexual desire is corrupt and defiles us. Obviously, this goes with our earlier discussion about purity in my last article. In the early centuries after Christ, sexuality came to be seen as defiling and impure.

Tatian the Assyrian – the second-century Church father who wished to ban marriage and sex itself – said:

“If anyone sows to the flesh, of the flesh he shall reap corruption; but he sows to the flesh who is joined to a woman; therefore, he who takes a wife and sows in the flesh, of the flesh he shall reap corruption.” — Hieron.: Com. in Ep. ad Gal.^[iii]

But today, no serious theologian actually equates sexual desire with the sinful nature. Even our old 4th-century friend Augustine did not do that. But whilst he doesn’t actually equate the flesh with the sexual nature, he linked sexual desire to the transmission of sin and thereby comes very close to criminalising sexuality. This in part explains how we got here.^[iv]

But when Paul wrote about the flesh in his letters three centuries earlier, he was not equating the flesh with our sexual nature at all.

“The flesh, denotes mere human nature, the earthly nature of man apart from divine influence, and therefore prone to sin and opposed to God” (Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon 1889)

When Paul talked about the life lived in the flesh in Galatians, he was talking about a life lived in the power and limits of the natural fallen nature, centred on self without regard for God or others. It was the opposite of a life lived in love led by the Holy Spirit and in subjection to God.

But the understanding of the average Christian in the pews or comfy chairs of a meeting today is that the “evil desires of the flesh” are primarily our sexual desires. I also assumed this was what this meant up until quite recently when I began to research sexuality and the Bible.

But who can blame them when they read the famous passage in Galatians?

“Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” ESV Galatians 5: 19 – 21.

That reads to a modern mind as:

Sexual immorality (Porneia) – anything to do with sex outside of marriage, including any fantasy or masturbation which involves sex outside of marriage.

Impurity (Akatharsia) – any sexual thought or desire unless strictly focused on my spouse. Any sexual attraction for someone you are not married to is impure and “lust”.

Sensuality (Aselgeia) – anything sensual or physically pleasurable, such as a massage, soft sheets and even sex. It raises concerns about whether one is indulging too much in fleshly sensual desires.

Orgies (kōmoi) – group sex parties.

Read this way, it seems Paul is very clear – the mark of a life led by the sinful desires of the flesh is one where people have sex outside of marriage, or have illicit sexual thoughts and desires, and allow themselves too much sensual pleasure, like maybe enjoying sex too much, being too kinky in bed, and having soft sheets.

But Paul really wasn’t saying any of that. What these words or concepts in the Greek actually meant is much closer to this:

Porneia was a broad umbrella of illicit sexual activities that included, for Second Temple Jews, prostitution, incest, ritual sex in pagan worship, bestiality, rape or exploitation. It could be described as turning sex into a degrading commodity or an act of exploitation or soulless transactional gratification. This is dealt with in my last article here. It did not consist simply of any sex outside of marriage as we are taught today, but seriously disordered sexual behaviour. ^[v]

Akatharsia means moral uncleanness — the corruption of character that comes from deceitful, exploitative, degrading or harmful ways of living that pollute the person.

As we saw in the last article, when Jesus was teaching on impurity, he wasn’t talking about sex outside of marriage, masturbation or having sexual thoughts. He was talking about:

“porneiai, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, shameless or uncontrolled behaviour, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within. These are the things that make a person unclean.”

Aselgeia – means shameless, unrestrained behaviour – self-indulgence that ignores moral limits, consequences and the wellbeing of others. It is shameless, uncontrolled behaviour — doing whatever you want because you no longer care who gets hurt, offended or used.

It has nothing to do with massage, enjoying sex too much, or soft sheets.

kōmoi – actually means riotous partying, festive drunkenness, revelry. It doesn’t mean orgies as used in the NIV and ESV. Other translations use the word “carousing”.

Whilst all of these words could include sexual excess, at their core they are about moral corruption, not desire.

This is a better paraphrase:

“Now the works of the flesh are evident: shameful, disordered and harmful sexual behaviour, moral corruption that pollutes character, and shameless uncontrolled self-indulgent behaviour carried out with complete disregard for anyone else, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, revelries and carousing, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Galatians 5: 19 – 21.

Once we go back to the original Greek and strip away bad translations and bad theology, we have a much clearer view of the things Paul was opposed to.

But why does any of this matter? Well, porneia itself is a very serious sin in the Bible. Paul says to flee from it, that it is a sin against your body, that no man who commits porneia has an inheritance in the kingdom of God and that it is completely incompatible with the Christian life.

But if you think that porneia is any sexual activity outside of the sanctity of marriage and that even thoughts or “hints of sexual immorality” make you impure, then you have a lot to be afraid of. As we have seen in my article “They Kept All the Rules,” this leads to teaching young people that masturbation is sinful because thinking sexually and not having a spouse leads one to sexual immorality in their mind. We are now securely in the realm of religious sexual thought control and regulation of the nervous system by fear of God and punishment.

If you have grown up on a lifetime diet of this, it is hard to feel sexy when you do get married, because your nervous system has learnt to shut down erotic desire. Research into purity culture and the outcomes in evangelical bedrooms shows that this level of self-surveillance takes a toll. See, for example, Sheila Wray Gregoire’s “The Great Sex Rescue.”^[vi]

When sexuality becomes a place of moral anxiety, Christians are deprived of the joy and freedom of the life-giving, God-given gift of intimacy and pleasure. It is stolen from them and traps the most scrupulous of them into a lifetime of repent-confess cycles of unworthiness, guilt and shame.

But unfortunately, these are not the only words that are sexualised in the translation of the Bible. They are scattered everywhere. Here is another one to leave you with:

“Now she who is a widow indeed and who has been left alone, has fixed her hope on God and continues in entreaties and prayers night and day. But she who gives herself to wanton pleasure is dead even while she lives.” 1 Timothy 5:5-6 NASB1995

She who gives herself to “wanton pleasure” …. hmmm. So, Paul is saying that good widows who are devout are okay, but those who engage in things like … orgies and sex parties are spiritually dead? So, the question arises – did they really have widows living in the church who were engaging in sex parties and other wanton pleasures?!

Okay, let’s check the Greek… hang on… okay, the Greek for “wanton pleasure” is σπαταλῶσα (spatalōsa) and it apparently only means “living in luxury and self-indulgence”. It’s only used in one other place which is in James 5:5 directed at rich people – “you have lived in wanton pleasure: you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.” NASB.

It turns out that the actual meaning of this word is living in luxury and self-indulgence and has nothing to do with sex. Clearly, Paul had strong feelings about widowed women with means living a fairly comfortable life, but that’s one for another conversation. At least we know she wasn’t going to any orgies!

Now I have to retranslate my Bible just to strip away the conservative sexual ethic that has been ingrained into the textual translations, and get back to what the Bible is saying. And it is much better news than we have been told!





ENDNOTES

^[i] The Greek vocabulary. Joseph Henry Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (1889), entries for ἐπιθυμία (epithymia), σάρξ (sarx), especially definition 4, ἀκαθαρσία (akatharsia), ἀσέλγεια (aselgeia), κῶμος (kōmos, plural kōmoi), and σπαταλάω (spatalaō, the verb behind spatalōsa). The linked pages reproduce these entries under “Thayer’s Greek Lexicon.”

^[ii] Matthew 5:28 and coveting. Eric D. Huntsman, “The Six Antitheses: Attaining the Purpose of the Law through the Teachings of Jesus,” in The Sermon on the Mount in Latter-day Scripture, edited by Gaye Strathearn, Thomas A. Wayment and Daniel L. Belnap (2010), 93–109, especially p. 100 and notes 27–30 on p. 108. Huntsman discusses the connection between epithymeō and the commandment against coveting. Note 27 identifies John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Eerdmans, 2005), p. 237, as supporting the “married woman” interpretation.

^[iii] The argument attributed to Tatian. Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, book III, on Galatians 6:8; reproduced as Tatian’s Fragments, fragment 3. For the attribution complication, see St. Jerome’s Commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon, translated by Thomas P. Scheck (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), p. 262, especially note 365: Scheck’s text reads “Cassianus,” while his note records “Tatianus” in Migne’s edition.

^[iv] Augustine on sexual desire and original sin. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, book I, chapters 17, 25 and 27, using the chapter numbering displayed in this translation. Chapter 17 distinguishes procreative intercourse from intercourse pursued for pleasure; chapter 25 discusses concupiscence without consent in the regenerate; chapter 27 explicitly connects concupiscence with the transmission of original sin.

^[v] Disputed Meaning of Porneia. Bruce Malina, “Does Porneia Mean Fornication?”, Novum Testamentum 14, no. 1 (1972): 10–17. For the opposing argument, see Joseph Jensen, “Does Porneia Mean Fornication? A Critique of Bruce Malina,” Novum Testamentum 20, no. 3 (1978): 161–184. These studies debate whether the New Testament term necessarily encompasses premarital intercourse outside commercial or cultic settings.

^[vi] Sexual teaching and marital experience. Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach and Joanna Sawatsky, The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended (Baker Books, 2021), especially “‘Duty Sex’ Isn’t Sexy,” beginning on p. 158, and “When Duty Becomes Coercion,” beginning on p. 179. See also Gregoire’s directly accessible account of the findings in “The Duty Sex Isn’t Sexy Podcast”, particularly its “Main Segment: Obligation Sex Isn’t Sexy” section.

Most people in church want to please the Lord and be pure. But the entire teaching around purity culture itself is demonic in origin, and I will show you why. When I talk about purity culture, I do not simply mean the purity rings of the 1990s; I mean the sex-negative conservative sexual ethic of most churches today.

But let’s start at the beginning with sexual sin. Because purity culture is supposed to help keep you from sexual sin. And that is a laudable aim. Paul had some very stern and serious warnings to give us about sexual sin. He told us that porneia was incompatible with life in the kingdom of God itself. Porneia is the Greek word that Paul used when talking about generic sexual immorality, and it is translated as either fornication in old English translations or simply as sexual immorality in modern translations.

“No sexually immoral person (porneai) has any inheritance in the kingdom of God.” 1 Corinthians 6.

And most readers today think they know what the writers are talking about! After all, we have all been told repeatedly in church what it means – “sex outside of marriage.”

But most people who are not scholars would be surprised to learn that this was not the meaning of the word in the first century. In fact, there is no scholarly consensus that porneia simply meant ‘sex outside marriage.’ Its boundaries in first-century Judaism and Christianity remain disputed, and the word itself cannot bear the entire modern purity-culture definition that is routinely loaded into the English phrase ‘sexual immorality’.

In brief, the meaning of porneia[i] evolved over time, and its exact meaning in the 1st century, when Paul used it, is still disputed among scholars. It originally meant simply prostitution and is the root word of our word for pornography. When the Jewish scholars translated the Torah into Greek in the 3rd century BC, it was used to mean prostitution and cultic prostitution. By the 1st century, its meaning had broadened to encompass an umbrella of sexual behaviours that were considered seriously disordered and wrong, but scholars still dispute its exact boundaries:

• Incest

• Rape/child abuse/exploitation (e.g. forcing your slaves to have sex with you)

• Sex with a prostitute (this was largely identical to the point above because slaves were often pressed into prostitution)

• Adultery (having sex with someone without the spouses’ agreement or consent)

• Bestiality

• Engaging in ritualistic sex or prostitution as part of pagan worship.

• Gay sex between men (very often pederasty)

But if you look at that list, we notice something that is missing – something shockingly absent if you were brought up in church – sex outside of marriage was simply not the uncontested definition of porneia in the first century that we are told it was.

That definition didn’t come until later centuries. When Jerome translated the Greek Bible into Latin in the 4th century CE, he used the word fornicatio, which meant arch or vault. The arches in Rome were known to be where prostitutes plied their trade in Rome. The word stuck, and from there we get our word fornication, which over time came to mean any sex outside of marriage. But by the time of Augustine and Jerome, the church looked disapprovingly at sex itself, considering it inherently sinful but permissible if it took place in marriage for procreation.

So, when we see “sexual immorality” in the Bible, we need to stop and realise that Paul is not simply referring to “sex outside of marriage”. When Paul spoke about porneia, he was describing big-ticket items – things that were seriously disordered. And even once we establish what Paul meant in his own world, we still have to ask how the underlying moral concerns should be applied in ours. It cannot simply be applied in blanket fashion to people today who are having loving, mutually pleasurable sex as equal partners outside of marriage.

We need to hold in mind something that is not often acknowledged by conservatives – that under the Judaic law under which both Jesus and Paul grew up, sex outside of marriage by men was not actually treated as sinful. Men in Israel frequently had sex with prostitutes and women who were unmarried, and whilst this was frowned upon, it did not result in condemnation under Jewish law. It was not treated as a sin. Jesus is also silent on the subject.

Indeed, making a rule to restrict sex exclusively to formal legal marriage as we are taught today would have been complicated. In the Roman world, many of Paul’s congregants would have been slaves. Slaves couldn’t get married in the same way as free men and women could. They could form a pair bond. They could call themselves married, but the Roman state did not recognise it. The master could separate them, sell them into prostitution or use them himself for his own pleasure, and this happened. Their children belonged to the slave master, not them. It is perhaps for this reason that Paul doesn’t use the specific word for husband and wife in 1 Corinthians 7. It is best read as “let each man have his own woman and each woman her own man.” There is enough flexibility in the language he uses to include both the formally married and those who were informally committed to each other but couldn’t marry.

Paul recommended that the Corinthians turn to marriage or long-term committed relationships (based on their social status) as a way to avoid the dangers of porneia. In Roman society, the option of pre-marital sex was not possible. Respectable free women belonged to their fathers before marriage, and an expectation of chastity was in place before and after marriage if you were a woman. This served to ensure that lineage could be assured. Men in Roman society, by contrast, were not required to be chaste, but could have sex with any woman who wasn’t already married to another man. In reality, this meant disposable women – slaves and prostitutes, and often boys who were not free. Curiously, Paul is strangely silent about the widespread practice of having sex with one’s slaves in his letters.

Given how rampant sexual exploitation and inequality were in Roman society, Paul’s encouragement to seek to have one’s needs met within marriage was pastoral and understandable. His insistence that the man’s body belonged to the woman and vice versa was also radical for its day – and moved the debate from double standards to shared mutual responsibility and faithfulness.

However, at no point does Paul state that sex outside of the covenant of marriage is inherently sinful.

When the apostles sent a letter to the new Gentile converts in the book of Acts, they gave them a short list of things to avoid. This included not eating food offered to idols, not eating blood, and avoiding porneia. This was not an injunction to avoid sex outside of marriage; it was an injunction to avoid porneia – the big-ticket items that were incompatible with being in Christ.

The Didache is a late first-century apostolic guide for living that had authority in the churches. It has a sexual ethic and condemns pederasty (“do not corrupt boys”), adultery and porneia. But at no point does it cite a simple rule or apply a belief that sex outside of the covenant of marriage was inherently sinful. This was simply not how sexual immorality was defined at this time in history.

Purity

Now that we understand the background to porneia a little better, let’s turn to the concept of purity itself. Our understanding of purity is completely different to that held by the writers of the Bible in the first century and, more importantly, that taught by Jesus.

Our concept of purity is now so ingrained that when we see the word purity in the Bible today, we are reading entirely the wrong message. Purity today is understood as being unstained from sexual lust, desire, thoughts, feelings or actions. We tell teenagers to be pure before marriage and we mean – don’t have sex, don’t make out, don’t masturbate, don’t look at porn, don’t allow yourself to have any sexual thoughts. Purity means saving oneself for marriage. We equate spirituality with some form of asexuality so that we can avoid any hint of sex outside of marriage whether in thought or deed. We talk about “impure thoughts”, meaning sexual thoughts. We equate sexual desire with sinful “lusts of the flesh.”

For women, this is even more pronounced, especially Christian women. The Madonna and the whore complex is deeply rooted in our own society and both evangelical and Catholic culture with respect to women. Christian women are expected to be almost asexual – virginal, sexually innocent, chaste, the good wife, and the exact opposite of the sexually confident and experienced whore who is the object of shame and disdain. Paul’s writings somewhat reinforce this idea of a chaste and moral wife as a model of Christian womanhood, reflecting the Roman cultural norms of the day.

But purity in the Bible did not mean this – this meaning developed much later in history in the late second, third and fourth centuries, culminating in the writings of Augustine of Hippo and Jerome (who translated the Bible into Latin). These writers reflected an extreme asceticism that rejected sexual pleasure and desire as essentially sinful. They were strongly influenced by cultural forces of their day like Stoicism, Plato, and pagan religious beliefs like Gnosticism and Manichaeism. They valued virginity, celibacy and “purity” in the sense that we now give to that word. The idea that sexual pleasure was somehow defiling – even within marriage – had come into Christianity.

Augustine systematised this belief in his writings, and they became the foundation stone of Catholic teaching about sex for the next 1600 years. The same beliefs were largely adopted by the Reformation too. Augustine systematised the belief that sexual pleasure was itself sinful and shameful and that, as a Christian, one should abstain unless one needed to have sex to have children (within marriage, of course).

“It is, however, one thing for married persons to have intercourse only for the wish to beget children, which is not sinful: it is another thing for them to desire carnal pleasure in cohabitation, but with the spouse only, which involves venial sin;” On Marriage and Concupiscence (lust) Book 1, Chapter 17. [ii]

He went on to explain what a “venial sin” meant in Homily 41 on John – in his own words:

“a crime is that which merits damnation, while that which does not merit damnation is venial.”[iii]

Augustine’s writings about sex reveal his negative approach:

“So intense is the pleasure that when it reaches its climax there is an almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed.”[iv]

He describes healthy sexual pleasure between a married couple as “lust” and “bestial”:

“It is right, therefore, to be ashamed of this lust, and right that the members which it moves or fails to move by its own right... should be called shameful.“
— The City of God, Book XIV, Chapters 17[v].

“The union, then, of male and female for the purpose of procreation is the natural good of marriage. But he makes a bad use of this good who uses it bestially, so that his intention is on the gratification of lust, instead of the desire of offspring.”

He recommends that the married couple desist from sex unless for the purpose of procreation:

“even they who wish to contract marriage only for the sake of children are to be admonished, that they use rather the larger good of continence [abstinence]... there is on all sides from out of all nations an overflowing fullness of spiritual kindred.”
— On the Good of Marriage, Chapter 10[vi]

It is worth pausing for a moment to realise what happened in the 4th century with Augustine. The Hebrew Bible had declared that creation was “very good”, which included sexuality. The book of Song of Songs celebrated sexual pleasure between two (as it happened – unmarried) people, without shame. This book seems to have no other purpose in the Bible apart from giving us that message – that of the joy of sexuality and pleasure.

The apostle Paul instructed couples to meet each other’s sexual needs in long-term relationships or marriage as a way to divert people from seriously dysfunctional sexual behaviour like porneia. By the 4th century, sex itself was treated as shameful and sinful, even within marriage, and Augustine systematised it into theology.

But what did Jesus mean by purity?

In the first century, purity was defined in two key ways:

1) Ritual purity – abstaining from certain foods that could defile you (such as shellfish, pork, etc.), or from touching anything associated with death such as a corpse, or from menstrual blood, or semen. This made one ceremonially unclean or impure, but was not considered to be a sin.

2) To be “pure” (Greek: katharos) meant to be integrous, whole, to be undivided and the same person on the inside as you were on the outside. In reality, it meant clean, undefiled and free from contamination. When Jesus says in Matthew 5:8 “blessed are the pure in heart…” he meant that the heart was undivided towards God – pure.

But if we want to understand what purity meant to Jesus, we need to turn to what he taught in Mark 7:14-23:

“Listen carefully and understand this: nothing that enters a person from outside makes that person unclean. What makes someone unclean is what comes out from within.

Do you still not understand? Don’t you see that whatever enters a person from outside cannot make them unclean, because it doesn’t enter the heart? It goes into the stomach and then passes out of the body.”

In saying this, he was declaring all foods clean — katharizō, cleansed or made clean.

Then Jesus said:

“What comes out of a person is what makes them unclean. Because from within, from the human heart, come evil thoughts: porneiai, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, shameless or uncontrolled behaviour, envy, slander, arrogance, and foolishness.

All these evil things come from within. These are the things that make a person unclean.”

Of course, sexual immorality is mentioned in the list that Jesus gave us, but he used the word porneiai, which, as we have seen, means seriously disordered sexual behaviour. It doesn’t mean sexual thoughts, loving sex between two unmarried people, or even masturbation. However, just to be clear – yes, of course, one would expect a Christian to manage their thoughts if they are seriously tempted to commit incest, actual adultery, rape, bestiality or to use temple prostitutes!

Today, when we talk about purity, we mean almost exclusively “sexual purity”. We have simply exchanged first-century rules of “do not touch, do not eat” for a new set of legalistic standards: “do not look – ‘bounce your eyes’”, “do not allow erotic thoughts”, “do not touch your sexual organs,” “suppress desire,” “do not go too far,” and if you are married, “don’t show too much ‘lust.’” But none of this appears in Jesus’ list.

Paul condemned exactly this sort of fleshly, rule-based and work-based approach to purity.

“You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? … Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? … how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore, keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.” Gal. 3:1-9 and 5:1.

Let’s take another example. Jesus told his disciples in John 13:10-11:

“He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean; and you are clean, but not all of you.”

For he knew the one who was betraying him; for this reason, he said, “not all of you are clean.”

Jesus clearly didn’t mean that his disciples were “clean” because they had stopped masturbating, hadn’t had sex before marriage or had any sexual thoughts. He also didn’t mean Judas was unclean because he still touched himself and entertained erotic thoughts in his head!

No, the reason Judas was unclean was because of what was in his heart and what he did – he stole money, he broke covenant, betrayed Jesus, and handed him over to death for money. That is his uncleanness.

Jesus consistently saw evil character and evil deeds as impurity and uncleanness. This had nothing to do with “impure” sexual thoughts or deeds.

Despite this, the new contaminant in our modern and unbiblical definition of purity is almost entirely sexual. This shift took place in the second and third and fourth centuries. Biblical scholar Moshe Blidstein argues in his book “Purity, Community and Ritual in Early Christian Literature” (Oxford Academic Books, 2017) that the first early writer to start integrating sexuality as a moral contaminant was one of the most influential early church fathers, Origen (185–254). Origen treated sexuality as a permanent, moral contaminant that acted as a barrier between an individual and God. This effectively shifted the ancient view (where bodily emissions caused temporary, routine ritual uncleanness resolved by simple washing) into a permanent moral stain requiring spiritual asceticism.

According to early Christian writer Eusebius, Origen allegedly castrated himself as a young man.

Purity Culture is the Doctrine of Demons

Paul warns us in 1 Timothy 4:1-5:

“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some people will turn away from the faith and start following deceptive spirits and doctrines of demons.

These teachings will come through hypocritical liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron.

They will forbid people to marry and tell them to avoid certain foods, even though God created these things to be received with gratitude by people who believe and know the truth.

Everything God created is good, and nothing should be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is made holy by the word of God and by prayer.”

1 Timothy 4:1-5

This warning in Timothy was prescient. In less than a hundred years after it was written, the influence of Gnostic and Manichean pagan religions had led to a place where some of the church fathers had started to push for a ban on all sex, including a ban on marriage itself. Tatian the Assyrian (110-180 CE) became highly influential in the eastern Empire as head of an extreme ascetic group called the Encratites. Tatian taught that marriage was licentious, impure, and a “service of the devil”, viewing all sexual relations as a form of corruption.[vii]

“If anyone sows to the flesh, of the flesh he shall reap corruption; but he sows to the flesh who is joined to a woman; therefore, he who takes a wife and sows in the flesh, of the flesh he shall reap corruption.” — Hieron.: Com. in Ep. ad Gal

The Encratites also banned the eating of meat and the consumption of wine. Tatian argued that Paul was too lenient towards sex and marriage and rejected some of his letters as unscriptural. The mainstream church fathers opposed Tatian’s teachings, and he was excommunicated. In 382 AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius the 1st issued decrees of death and confiscation of property to any of his followers, and the movement eventually died out.

But although many of the mainstream church fathers felt that Tatian had gone too far[viii], they had adopted the belief wholesale that sexual pleasure was a spiritual contaminant. For example, in his later life, Tertullian took the view that a second marriage was spiritual polygamy and that marriage was good only when “compared with the greatest of all evils”. He also believed that sexual desire for one’s wife was no different to adulterous desire. He believed that sex even in marriage would disrupt the Christian life and that abstinence was the best way to achieve the clarity of the soul.

Jerome and Augustine of Hippo, whilst defending marriage, both regarded it as spiritually inferior to celibacy, and the act of sexual intercourse as spiritually corrupt. Sex within marriage for the sole purpose of procreation was deemed acceptable and pragmatically necessary, but sex for pleasure was still described as a “venial sin” in Augustine’s work.

So, within less than 200 years, the church had drifted from Jesus’ teaching that purity was a question of what comes from your heart to a form of purity teaching where normal sexual desire had become a spiritual contaminant.

And whilst purity culture does not ban sex itself, it borrows from the same sources and has been swimming in the same waters as the Encratites, Augustine and Jerome. If there is one thing that gives the “accuser of the brethren” the power to bring people under constant condemnation, it is the shame, guilt and sin consciousness that these teachings instil in Christians for simply being sexual at all.

Today we continue to promote the fetishisation of this Gnostic, Manichean concept of purity, instead of learning to integrate healthy sexuality and pleasure into our lives as a normal and perfectly spiritual part of life. To put it bluntly – we have incorporated the “doctrine of demons” into our church culture and theology and push this in our churches on young people. The result is bad fruit – entrenched sexual guilt and shame about morally healthy sexual feelings, vaginismus at 2.5 times the rate of non-Christians[ix], sexual anxiety, and often dead bedrooms in long-term Christian marriages[x].

We need to reform our theology of the body, of pleasure and what is spiritual, so people can flourish as truly healthy sexual beings. We need to get back to the purity that Jesus told us mattered – that which comes from the heart.

Part 2 – In Part 2, I will show how the very words we use have moved over time so we now read the Bible through the lens of the 3rd- and 4th-century church, and have layered historical reinterpretation into the text.

Endnotes

^[i] “Sacred not Sinful – a New Christian Ethic” by Dr Kevin Jenson, chapter 18.

^[ii] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/15071.htm read chapter 17

^[iii] https://goodcatholicbooks.org/SummaI-II_mortal-and-venial-sin.html as quoted by Thomas Aquinas.

^[iv] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120114.htm read chapter 16.

^[v] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/15071.htm read chapter 17.

^[vi] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1309.htm read chapter 9 and 10.

^[vii] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103128.htm

^[viii] https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement-stromata-book3-english.html read chapter 12 81-82

[1] “The Good Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended | Restore Passion in Christian Marriage | Biblical Relationship Book for Couples” by Sheila Wray Gregoire. A survey of 22,000 women in evangelical churches about their sex lives. Sheila Wray Gregoire is herself an evangelical Christian. Her substack is here.

^[x] They Kept All the Rules – link to article. https://martyntyndale.substack.com/p/they-kept-all-the-rules?r=8hii2p&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

In one of my churches I had to sit through at least six separate teachings about why women had to wear something on their heads in church when they were praying or prophesying. That is six hours of my life I will never get back!

When I moved churches, I heard the same message at least another two more times. I got the message – women were to wear a scarf over their heads! But I was really none the wiser for why!

It had something to do with the fact that Paul told us women had to do it, and something weirdly convoluted about men being “the head”, and women being the “glory of man”, and of course “because of the angels”.

Ah yes – “because of the angels!”

That one was the final nail in the argument – a final blow that settled it. And who could argue with that?! If angels were worried about it then it must be a universal truth that we had to observe. And we can’t have angels being distressed about women’s hair.

But deep down I couldn’t help thinking this was what Vishen Lakhani calls a “BRULE” – in other words a “bullshit rule”, made by a culture or convention that we all keep but which makes no sense. BRULES dominate and limit our lives if left unexamined. And no area has more of them than the area of conservative Christian sexuality.

But in my quest to unpack BRULES handed down to me by the church and relearn what the Bible actually teaches about sex, I have learned to dig into the original meaning of the text, the context and world of that time and think deeply about what the Bible is really telling us. And it is there that I stumbled upon a little piece of historical context that actually suddenly makes sense of the original passage in 1 Corinthians 11.

Read with this one piece of information, the whole passage stops looking like a bizarre patriarchal, random instruction about a preferred local cultural dress code, and suddenly makes sense. Like a special key, which when applied, makes the whole passage lock into place. It becomes coherent and intelligible.

What is that key? It is this:

In the ancient world of the Corinthians, a woman’s hair, when worn loose, could signal her sexuality and desirability, and even hint at sexual availability. The chaste Roman wife, by contrast, wore her hair up, plaited or covered. In addition, women participating in the religious ecstasy of the Bacchae also wore their hair loose, flowing and free. And when you put that together with the fact that these women were married, the implications were not a good look....

So, what Paul was objecting to was not simply a dress-code issue; it was potentially more serious than that. He was challenging boundary-breaching behaviour in worship which could be understood as women publicly flaunting their sexuality and hinting at sexual availability despite being married.

With this in mind try rereading the entire passage – suddenly it clicks into place – the reference to shame, shaved heads, dishonouring the head or husbands etc. Some scholars also argue that Paul’s understanding of hair covering was not necessarily a veil but included having the hair tied up.

What doesn’t make sense though is the line about the angels. “For a woman should have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels”.

No-one really knows what Paul meant. Did he mean that angels are troubled by this behaviour? Was he making reference to the fallen angels transgressing boundaries and having sex with women as in Genesis 6 verse 2? Does he simply mean human messengers who had been sent to spy out their meetings secretly?

The original Greek does not include the words “symbol of authority”. That is actually an additional wording translators have added to try and be helpful. The actual wording is closer to:

“For the woman ought to have authority over/on her head, because of the angels.”

Make of that what you will – but it is one of the most contested parts of the whole passage and can hardly be used to affirm anything!

Now, wearing one’s hair long in today’s society absolutely does not mean the same thing today as it did in the first century. It has no sexual connotation; it signifies nothing about sexual availability or that a woman may be cuckolding her husband. It is just a normal innocent practice.

But 2,000 years later churches still don’t understand the reasons behind the rule yet insist that we apply it.

One modern parallel to what Paul was objecting to might be men and women coming to church dressed for a nightclub, wearing the skimpiest, most revealing attire.

A few years ago, I wandered into the church I used to go to when I was a young man. It had taken 12 years of my life and given me many positive things. I met my wife there, we had our first child there, made good friends, our Christian lives were formed in many ways there. But it also had a deeply legalistic performance culture and it was here that I had to sit through those six sermons on head covering.

As I wandered in, I happened across the new pastor, and a young man – loyal, a keen supporter of the church. We got chatting. I told them about the old days, the charismatic leader who founded the church, those early days, the growth, the breakthroughs, the good times we had.

But I then naively said, with a laugh, “but they were a bit obsessed with head covering!”

I suddenly felt the atmosphere shift.

Feeling the silence, and that somehow that I needed to justify this remark, I followed it up by pointing out that they had preached this at least six times! Six times I repeated!

The young man who had gone quiet glanced nervously at the pastor. The pastor shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, but said diplomatically in a quiet, steady voice – “six times? That’s a lot…”

And I realised we had perhaps reached a point of divergence…!

Later I told friends, with whom I was staying, what I had said. They were both still members of this church.

“Oh no you didn’t say that?!” They exclaimed. “They are absolutely obsessed with it! They even made some non-Christian girls wear the head covering to participate in the youth group, and they never came back!”

So here we see the ridiculous and ludicrous spectacle of a rule based on a first-century cultural meaning applied today to people who have no idea why they were required to observe it. A BRULE.

If Paul insisted on it to make the church more accessible to outsiders, the irony is that it is now being applied in such a way as to put outsiders off!

The Bible is a difficult book. Applying a literalistic approach to reading it is a deeply flawed approach. What we have is one side of a conversation between Paul and various churches. We do not have the other side of the conversation, the full cultural context or meaning behind those instructions, and rely on centuries-old interpretations, rules and customs to get us by.

Conservative teachings on sexuality are highly rule based. These are frequently inherited and unexamined rules, many of which have been shaped by philosophies that do not have even have Biblical roots. “Do not wear anything too attractive,” “no sex before marriage,” “do not kiss on a date,” “sexual thoughts are impure and lustful,” “if you are single, you can’t masturbate because you don’t have a spouse,” “if you are married you can’t masturbate, your body is only for sharing,” “it’s your duty to give your husband sex and keep him satisfied,” etc.

Some of you are saying – “oh wait! But isn’t that what the Bible teaches?”

Actually no, it doesn’t, or at least you need to adopt a particular interpretation of the Bible to believe that and ignore other parts of the Bible. You have to be ignorant of the meaning of key words in the Greek, or take symbolic pictures for strict legislation beyond what the text says. They are BRULES, they are interpretations, and rules of man, taught as though they carry divine authority, and presented as Biblical truth beyond question. There are many things that the conservative Christian sexual ethic passes off as Biblical truth which are traditions and man-made rules.

They have real consequences in people’s lives that go far beyond the wearing of a hair piece. See article “They kept all the rules”.

But if anyone wishes to be contentious about this, we have no other practice. It is because of the angels!

😂

ENDNOTES

1. Hair, head coverings and respectable female appearance in Roman Corinth

Cynthia L. Thompson, “Hairstyles, Head-Coverings, and St. Paul: Portraits from Roman Corinth,” The Biblical Archaeologist 51, no. 2 (1988): 99–115. Thompson examines archaeological evidence from Corinth itself — statues, coins and figurines — to reconstruct the hairstyles and head coverings familiar to Paul’s audience. Her evidence shows the importance of elaborately arranged and bound female hair and cautions against simply assuming that Paul’s language must refer to a separate veil.

2. Marriage, sexual respectability and the head covering

Bruce W. Winter, After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), especially his discussion of 1 Corinthians 11 and the “new Roman woman.” Winter argues that Paul’s instructions should be read against changing Roman social conventions surrounding married women, sexual respectability and the public markers of marital status. His particular reconstruction — that some Christian wives were dispensing with conventional markers of married respectability — is influential but not universally accepted.

Interestingly, a much more recent treatment by Callie Callon argues that the passage is most plausibly directed particularly toward free or freed wives, precisely because head covering communicated matronly status and sexual modesty in antiquity. Callie Callon, “Authority Over Whose Head? Did Paul Instruct Wives or All Women to Cover Their Heads (1 Corinthians 11:2–16)?,” Harvard Theological Review (2024).

3. Paul may be talking about the way the hair is worn, rather than simply requiring a veil

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “1 Corinthians 11:2–16 Once Again,” in Keys to First Corinthians: Revisiting the Major Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 159–181. Murphy-O’Connor argues from literary and archaeological evidence that Paul’s concern includes how women arrange their hair and concludes that 11:10 can be understood as requiring a woman to exercise control over her own head — that is, to dress her hair appropriately.

4. “A woman ought to have authority over her head”

Murphy-O’Connor consequently translates the sense as a woman exercising control over her head/hair. The interpretation remains disputed, but it demonstrates that the familiar idea that Paul explicitly commands women to wear a symbol of male authority requires interpretation being inserted into the translation itself.

5. “Because of the angels” — there is no agreed explanation

The phrase in 1 Corinthians 11:10 remains notoriously obscure. Interpretations include heavenly angels present at worship; an allusion to the transgressive “sons of God”/Watchers tradition associated with Genesis 6; and angeloi in its ordinary Greek sense of human “messengers.” Murphy-O’Connor, for example, proposes visitors or messengers from other churches who might report what they observed in Corinth. Other scholars retain supernatural angels. There is no scholarly consensus sufficient to make the phrase the interpretative trump card it has sometimes become.

I read something today that made me angry.

Actually, two things.

Two stories, posted in different places, by people who do not know each other. But they belong to the same world – the same conservative sexual framework. The one shows someone teaching the framework, and the other shows what it can do to a human life.

The first came from a youth pastor responding to a Christian discussion about masturbation.

He was glad the subject was being talked about. Silence, he said, creates shame. So far, so good.

But then came the theology. But let me allow him to introduce himself:

“I’m a youth pastor. When I bring this subject up (masturbation), you can imagine the shock on the eyes of the kids. Not because they don’t know what I’m talking about, but because someone is actually addressing it.

Silence fosters shame and shame drives people away from Jesus to be sure. But avoiding shame by means of excusing sin isn’t the solution and that’s what so many people have done.

It is “disordered” to masturbate. There’s no way around that. In order to accomplish the task, a person must be thinking sexual thoughts. For the single Christian, you don’t have a spouse to focus those thoughts on, therefore it’s sinful. If you aren’t thinking sexual thoughts, it’s also disordered in the sense that now something is clearly broken in your brain that’s causing you to abuse the sexual parts of your body that were meant for another.
I used to joke with my students that if you can masturbate thinking about strawberries, or if in fact you think a tractor is sexy (we’re in Texas, so that song works well for this practice 😂), something is terribly wrong. It led to giggles but made the point.

It’s not for no reason that in the lust convo, Jesus brought up “if your hand causes you to sin…” along with the eye. Was He talking exclusively about masturbation? No, but you certainly can’t say he wasn’t talking about it either.

Instead of alleviating shame in the minds of our kids (or adults) by passing off their shame invoking actions, we need to send them to the one who pardons sin and frees from shame. Self soothing shame is just as disordered as self gratification.”


There we have it:

Masturbation is “disordered.” A single Christian cannot masturbate while thinking sexual thoughts because there is no spouse towards whom those thoughts can legitimately be directed. And if you masturbate without sexual thoughts, then apparently something is “broken in your brain” because you are misusing sexual parts of your body that were “meant for another.”

That stopped me.

Because this is not simply a teaching about masturbation.

It is a whole way of understanding the sexual self.

Your body is not really yours. Your sexual imagination is not really yours. Desire is permitted only when it is directed towards the person and purpose the framework has approved. Anything outside that boundary is not merely unwise or potentially harmful. It is disordered. It is sin. It requires pardon.

And then I read the second story.

That one grieved me.

“My wife and I were both raised in very conservative churches. We got married in our 20s, we were both virgins on our wedding night. I had been waiting as long as I could remember to see a naked woman and enter her body as God designed. However, my wife just couldn’t get past the road block placed in her head by the church that sex was “dirty” or “wrong” until a flip is magically flipped at the wedding. It took just over two weeks for her to have sex with me. She felt so terrible that she left the bed and prayed for forgiveness. We spent years working through this struggle and had a few kids. But the last pregnancy was extremely difficult physically. We decided it wasn’t safe to have anymore kids. We celebrated our wedding anniversary last week and had a lovely evening. As we were going to bed I kissed her and started undressing her. She stopped me and informed me that, since we were not having anymore kids, she would not be having sex again. I’m so frustrated and have no idea what to do. Our sex life has always been really bad. I’ve tried to always be helpful but I believe sex is good and needed for a strong marriage. Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.”

And there we have it.

The blocks are put on in youth group and church. Sexual desire, fantasy and pleasure outside their authorised context are treated as morally dangerous and must be suppressed. But when you are married, you can’t just “flip the switch” on.

But worse than this. Whatever has happened to her sexuality, she has now reached the point of saying that sex is over. Sex was probably a chore, a duty. Something she did to keep her husband happy, and to have children. Not something that she did for herself, in her own right, for her own pleasure.

The situation is now bleak.

The most optimistic scenario is that they will go to counselling at church - and try to address it. But I would suggest that they actually need to go to a sexologist with training in religious trauma.

But the likelihood is that if they seek counselling it will be from people inside their own framework. Possibly a pastor, untrained in religious trauma, untrained in sexology, focused on working within the rules. He knows that the rules say that a husband and a wife must not deprive each other (1 Corinthians 7). Probably this will be his key advice. Knowing this is expected of her, she may do so, but compliance is not desire. It will be duty sex. She won’t enjoy it. He won’t feel connected, joined, alive.

Duty sex robs them both, but it ticks the box.

What she needs is to be allowed to discover her own sexuality, her own desires, allowed to use her erotic imagination, allowed to discover pleasure and her own body, for the first time and yes allowed that “disordered” thing someone once told her was sinful - to masturbate as part of the process.

But what if she doesn’t agree to seek help? What if it really is over now? What if, in fact, she is really asexual, or isn’t attracted to men, but to women and has no place for this and so buries it? What if she simply doesn’t know?

Where does it leave them?

A dead bedroom, kids, married for life. Loneliness, grief, sadness.

No language for talking about sex or desire outside of the box. No permission to even think outside the strict confines of church-approved sexuality. No permission even to ask what either of them actually wants.

They both kept the rules. They did what was asked of them. They submitted to the teachings that have been handed down from churches for centuries and never questioned.

What are his options?

Divorce? He can’t remarry – that would be committing adultery. It is a sin. Besides he still has children.

Does he have an affair? That also is a sin. The hurt and harm that this would do to them both is incalculable.

Could they renegotiate the boundaries of their marriage consensually? That would be heretical, and enough to have them excommunicated and banished from the community. Shunned. And in their framework – it would send them to eternal conscious torment in hell.

The traditional conservative church has no answers to this.

But what exactly has this sexual ethic protected?

Where did this rigid framework come from, and is it really the only legitimate biblical option available to us?

When I was a boy I had a vision of Jesus as a kind of first century hippy.

Peace. Love. Be nice to everyone.

It was based largely on my completely unchurched encounter with Jesus through the wonderfully 1970s film Jesus Christ Superstar.

Then I became a Christian myself about five years later and had an encounter with Jesus that completely changed that picture.

As a young adolescent I had experienced rejection. It had destroyed something inside me. But as a brand new Christian Jesus showed me His own scars. He opened my eyes to the rejection he felt. The hate. The pain.

It was profound.

I suddenly understood that Jesus knew rejection. He had been despised. Rejected. Abandoned by people He loved. He knew what that pain felt like from the inside.

And because He had experienced it, He could meet me in mine. In that experience something happened – by His wounds I was somehow made whole. That rejection was lifted out of my life. My heart felt whole for the first time in years.

But in that moment, Jesus suddenly went from this floaty, love-drugged-up hippy to someone grounded in the harsh reality of human existence.

That Jesus was far more interesting.

Far more powerful.

And far more human.

Over the years I came to know the Jesus of the New Testament. But last year something else shifted.

I realised I had been carrying another distorted picture of Jesus for decades.

I think most Christians have.

We have created an asexual Jesus.

The Jesus we don’t quite believe was human

This happened during a time of prayer when I was talking to God about sexuality and faith, and particularly about some of the things I had been discovering while writing The Yoke We Were Never Meant to Bear.

If I were a hyper-charismatic Christian I could probably describe what happened as a “visitation from heaven”. Jesus came into the room and stood before me.

That would be too dramatic.

It was quieter than that.

But something happened in prayer in which I became profoundly aware of Jesus being right there with me and showing me that he had been a man just like me.

And I mean a man just like me.

Not simply that He got hungry like me.

Or tired like me.

Or hurt like me.

I mean that Jesus inhabited the same kind of male human body that I do.

Including a sexual one.

And bizarrely, that shocked me.

Because despite believing for more than 30 years that Jesus was “fully human”, somewhere deep inside I had quietly inserted an exception.

Jesus was fully human – but not sexual.

Of course nobody actually said that.

It was simply assumed.

Jesus didn’t have those feelings.

Jesus wasn’t sexually aroused. He didn’t get erections. He didn’t discover his body like we did. Jesus didn’t experience sexual attraction.

Jesus didn’t have the embarrassing physical experiences of adolescent boys and young men.

Jesus was “pure”.

And that word gives the whole game away.

Because somewhere along the way we have made sexuality and “purity” opposites.

If Jesus was sexually alive like us then somehow He becomes less holy.

And that tells us something very important.

Not about Jesus.

About us.

Put your seat belt on

Christian theology insists that Jesus was fully human.

This isn’t some optional theological extra.

The New Testament writers fought over it.

Jesus came in the flesh.

Sarx.

Flesh and blood.

Not God pretending to be human. Not God wearing a human costume. Not some divine spirit floating six inches above the dirt.

A man.

We are perfectly happy talking about the bits of Jesus’ humanity that don’t make us uncomfortable.

Jesus got hungry.

Jesus got thirsty.

Jesus got exhausted.

Jesus got angry.

Jesus cried.

Jesus grieved.

Jesus needed sleep.

Jesus sweated.

Jesus bled.

All fine.

But when we start to talk about sexuality and Jesus, suddenly everyone starts shuffling awkwardly in their seats.

Because Jesus also had a male human body.

He had hormones.

He went through puberty.

His body developed sexually.

He experienced the ordinary involuntary physical processes of being male. Erections, ejaculations, pleasure, erotic attraction and feelings.

At this point someone will inevitably shout:

HERESY!

But actually the heresy is much closer to the opposite.

Jesus was tempted

Hebrews says something astonishing about Jesus:

He was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.

Every way.

We usually quote that verse because it makes Jesus relatable.

Whatever temptation you face, Jesus understands.

But if Jesus was genuinely tempted as we are then sexual temptation has to be included.

He had to know what attraction felt like.

He had to know what arousal felt like.

He had to know what it was to encounter another beautiful human being and feel something in His body.

Otherwise He wasn’t tempted as we are.

Now let me be very clear about what I am not saying.

I am not saying Jesus had partnered sex.

There is no evidence that He did.

I am not saying He was married.

There is no evidence for that either.

And I am certainly not inventing a secret sex life for Jesus.

I am saying something much simpler.

Jesus had a normal sexuality.

Because human beings have sexuality.

And Jesus was human.

The astonishing thing is that this feels controversial.

We have confused sexuality with sin

This is where I think Christianity has gone badly wrong.

We have become so accustomed to treating sexual desire as morally suspicious that we cannot imagine Jesus experiencing it without somehow contaminating Him.

Sexual attraction becomes “lust”.

Arousal becomes dangerous.

Fantasy becomes impurity.

Pleasure becomes something requiring moral justification.

So obviously Jesus couldn’t have experienced any of that.

He was holy.

But what if sexual desire itself isn’t dirty?

What if arousal isn’t a moral failure?

What if the sexual body isn’t something Jesus had to suppress in order to remain holy?

What if our inability to imagine a sexual Jesus doesn’t reveal His holiness at all?

What if it reveals our shame?

That possibility landed very powerfully with me.

Because suddenly the problem wasn’t Jesus’ sexuality.

It was mine.

Or rather, what Christianity had taught me to believe about mine.

For decades I had unconsciously imagined that becoming more like Jesus meant becoming less sexual.

More controlled.

More detached from desire.

Less interested in pleasure.

Less embodied.

Somewhere at the end of Christian maturity was apparently a man who could walk through life completely untroubled by sex.

Basically an asexual monk.

And we projected that man backwards onto Jesus.

“Can you imagine Jesus doing it?”

Years ago I heard a story about an argument between some prominent British apostolic leaders.

The argument was about masturbation.

Gerald Coates apparently took the position that masturbation wasn’t inherently sinful and challenged the other leaders along the lines of:

“You all do it. Admit it!”

This apparently went down like a cup of cold sick.

The argument became heated and Gerald eventually left their apostolic grouping.

But one of the clinching arguments from the other side was apparently this:

“Can you imagine Jesus doing it?”

Boom.

Case closed.

Because obviously nobody could.

But think about that argument for a moment.

Why couldn’t they imagine it?

The Bible never says Jesus didn’t masturbate.

It doesn’t say He did either.

We know absolutely nothing about it.

The entire argument therefore depends upon an imaginary Jesus.

And the Jesus they imagined was an asexual one.

The logic goes like this:

I cannot imagine Jesus experiencing this sexual behaviour.

Therefore Jesus didn’t.

Therefore it must be unholy.

But perhaps we have got that completely backwards.

Perhaps the reason we cannot imagine Jesus experiencing ordinary sexuality is because we have already loaded it with shame, and guilt?

We built the conclusion into the question.

The soft heresy nobody notices

There was an early Christian heresy called Docetism.

At its simplest, Docetism struggled with the idea that God could genuinely inhabit human flesh.

The physical world was corrupt.

Spirit was pure.

Therefore Jesus couldn’t really have entered corrupted physical existence in the same way we do.

He only appeared to be human.

The church rightly rejected this.

Jesus came in the flesh.

But I think Western Christianity has retained a soft version of the same idea.

Of course Jesus was human, we say.

Just not quite human like us.

He came into the swimming pool of humanity wearing a divine wetsuit.

He got wet enough to understand us but somehow wasn’t contaminated by the water.

And nowhere is this clearer than sexuality.

We have allowed Jesus hunger because hunger isn’t shameful.

We have allowed Him exhaustion because tiredness isn’t shameful.

We have allowed Him grief because grief isn’t shameful.

We have allowed Him anger because anger can be righteous.

But sexual desire?

No.

Because we still believe that sexual desire itself carries contamination.

This is not really a doctrine about Jesus.

It is a doctrine about the body.

And it didn’t come from Jesus.

So where did the asexual Jesus come from?

From the second century onwards Christianity began moving away from its Hebraic roots and absorbing ideas from the surrounding philosophical world.

Stoicism.

Platonism.

Gnosticism.

Later Manichaeism.

Different movements, different beliefs, but with an increasingly familiar suspicion of bodily desire.

The spiritual life became associated with mastery over the body.

Then renunciation of the body.

Then harsh treatment of the body.

Celibacy became spiritually superior to marriage.

Virginity became spiritually superior to sexual experience.

Eventually Augustine would argue that even sex within marriage carried venial fault when motivated by sexual pleasure rather than procreation.

Think about what that does to the Christian imagination over 1,500 years.

The really spiritual person doesn’t need sex.

The really spiritual person masters desire.

The really spiritual person rises above bodily pleasure.

So what must the most spiritual human being who ever lived have been like?

Obviously:

Asexual.

Except Jesus wasn’t a fourth-century Christian ascetic.

He was a first-century Jew.

And that matters.

Jesus came from a culture that wrote the Song of Songs

The Hebrew scriptures are remarkably comfortable with the body.

God creates human beings embodied and calls creation very good.

Men and women desire one another.

They have sex.

They enjoy sex.

And sitting right there in the middle of the Bible is an entire book celebrating erotic desire.

The Song of Songs.

Two lovers longing for each other’s bodies.

Breasts.

Kisses.

Fragrance.

Touch.

Desire.

Erotic anticipation.

Very little embarrassment.

And remarkably little moral anxiety.

We have spent centuries trying to turn it into an allegory about Christ and the Church because apparently two people wanting to get each other’s clothes off is insufficiently spiritual to belong in the Bible.

But it does belong there.

Because erotic desire belongs within human life.

Jesus grew up inside that world.

He knew those scriptures.

He was formed by them.

So perhaps Jesus didn’t experience sexuality as the contaminating force that Western Christians later learnt to experience it as.

Perhaps He experienced desire without shame.

That possibility changes everything.

Something happened to me

During that encounter in prayer I mentioned earlier, I became aware of something else.

Not merely that Jesus understood my sexuality. Or that He wasn’t embarrassed by it. But I felt that during this encounter He showed me how He saw sexuality.

Jesus’ vision of sexual pleasure is completely and radically different to the one we hear about in church.

The closest way I can describe it is to point you to the Song of Songs. This book literally sings it.

Not dirty.

Not corrupt.

Not something God tolerates provided we keep it for making babies or behind moral fencing.

No, sexual pleasure was something to be celebrated – something:

Beautiful.

Powerful.

Joyful.

Life affirming.

Sacred.

A holy fire.

And the word that kept coming to me was:

pure.

That is an odd word to use about erotic desire in Christianity.

We normally use purity to mean the absence of sexuality.

Pure thoughts are thoughts without sex in them.

A pure teenage boy is one who isn’t masturbating.

A pure young woman is one who isn’t thinking sexual thoughts.

A pure Christian marriage is one in which sexual imagination stays safely inside the approved boundaries.

But what if we have misunderstood purity?

What if sexual desire can itself be pure?

Not because everything we might do sexually is therefore good.

Of course not.

Sexuality can be exploitative.

Selfish.

Violent.

Manipulative.

Destructive.

Like every powerful part of human nature it can be used to harm.

But the existence of destructive sexuality doesn’t make sexuality itself dirty any more than gluttony makes food dirty.

Desire itself is not the enemy.

This changed something in me

For most of my Christian life I have carried a subtle tension between my sexuality and my spirituality.

I didn’t always notice it.

But it was there.

Sex belonged in one room.

God belonged in another.

You could move between the rooms, obviously.

But you tidied yourself up first.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Because if Jesus really entered human existence then He entered all of it.

The body isn’t the embarrassing container carrying the spiritual bit of us around.

Our sexuality isn’t some unfortunate biological drive that God reluctantly permits under licence after marriage.

We are embodied human beings.

Sexual beings.

Spiritual beings.

There isn’t a clean line dividing them.

And Jesus stands right in the middle of that integration.

Fully God.

Fully human.

Fully embodied.

And yes.

Fully sexual.

I think some Christians will find that sentence deeply uncomfortable.

I understand why.

It once made me uncomfortable too.

But perhaps we should sit with that discomfort for a moment rather than immediately trying to make it disappear.

Because the discomfort might be telling us something.

If imagining Jesus hungry doesn’t disturb us...

If imagining Jesus sweating doesn’t disturb us...

If imagining Jesus naked on a Roman cross doesn’t disturb our theology...

But imagining Him experiencing sexual arousal does...

Then perhaps the problem isn’t Jesus.

Perhaps after nearly two thousand years of Christian suspicion towards the body, we still haven’t quite made peace with the incarnation.

We say the Word became flesh.

Maybe it’s time we actually believed it.




Endnotes
1. 1 John 4:2–3. The reality of Jesus coming “in the flesh” was not peripheral to early Christianity. See also John 1:14 and 2 John 7.
2. Hebrews 4:15. The text says Jesus was tempted “in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” My argument that this necessarily includes the sexual dimension is an inference from the universality of that statement, rather than something Hebrews explicitly discusses.
3. Docetism was an early Christian tendency to deny or diminish the reality of Christ's physical humanity, presenting his embodied existence and suffering as in some sense merely apparent. I use “soft Docetism” in this article to describe something less explicit: affirming that Jesus was fully human while unconsciously exempting him from aspects of ordinary embodied human experience.
4. See Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, especially chapters 1–7, for an extraordinarily early insistence upon the real flesh, suffering and resurrection of Jesus against those who denied it.
5. Augustine, De Bono Coniugali (On the Good of Marriage). Augustine regarded marital intercourse for procreation as blameless, while intercourse undertaken to satisfy sexual desire carried venial fault.
6. For the rise of sexual renunciation and ascetic attitudes in early Christianity, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity.
7. See Song of Songs 1:2; 2:3–6; 4:1–7; 7:6–9 for the remarkably uninhibited celebration of embodied erotic desire within Hebrew scripture.

From the age of 18 until I married at 22, I led a totally “pure” life. It was so “pure” that I renounced all sexual pleasure and I didn’t masturbate.

When I met my wife, I fell deeply in love and our relationship quickly blossomed into erotic desire, touch and kissing. But this had a catastrophic effect on my conscience. I suddenly felt guilty because I was so often aroused. The suppression continued, but I felt contaminated by my desire despite the fact that we kept all the rules. I never felt good enough, and I spiralled into a legalistic quest to please God more, to somehow win His approval by praying harder, reading my Bible more and being more committed.

None of this resulted in peace. It generated the opposite – more condemnation, more guilt and more hard work to earn favour.

Anyone who has been a Christian for a long time will recognise that I had slipped into legalism. It took me several years to come out of it.

But recently I asked myself – where did I get the idea that I needed to suppress my sexuality to be spiritual? Who told me that? Where did it come from?

The truth is I had simply picked it up by osmosis from what I had heard about the church, what I thought was true of Christianity. It was simply the working assumption in Western culture. I had learnt that to be a Christian meant dying to your sinful nature, which was mostly your sexual nature. I understood implicitly – without anyone telling me – that spirituality was the opposite of sexuality.

For the next 30 years I lived with this cultural baggage at the back of my mind. It wasn’t until recently that I finally became free of it – in the process of writing the book “The Yoke We Were Never Meant to Bear”. But when that yoke fell off something changed.

I realised that for 30 years I had felt uneasy in Christian settings, I had felt uncomfortable in outreach events, and I had felt unqualified to pray for people. The uncomfortable feeling had sometimes held me back from doing these things, and had made me less than enthusiastic about prayer meetings, small groups or church meetings. That nagging feeling was a sense of moral contamination and guilt, an unworthiness. It came from the incessant feeling that my sexuality, my desires, were at odds with my spirituality. It also came from another feeling deep down that I didn’t want to castrate myself to fit the spiritual mould. It is the spiritual battle inside most Christians today, especially those most susceptible to scrupulosity.

Most evangelical charismatic churches have a pattern at the start of worship. The worship meeting doesn’t quite pick up and take off. Then a couple of “words” come out addressing people feeling condemned, guilty or unworthy. These are reminders that we were washed, are justified and purified of all sin. After that the meeting often goes a bit better.

My suspicion is that a large number of people in those meetings felt like me, and were subtly condemned by the culture and sense of unworthiness due to not meeting the standards of “purity”.

As you grow as a Christian you learn to confess, repent and accept the forgiveness and carry on. You learn more about God’s grace, and generally this becomes less chronic as a pattern. But it never really goes away. You are forever trapped in a “sin, confess, repent” cycle triggered by a sexualised thought, a brief dalliance with a fantasy, maybe you watched a sex scene on TV, maybe you gave in to masturbating, maybe you gave in and watched some porn. You feel condemned.

This cycle is so marked, that one exvangelical scholar has even suggested that it’s deliberate – the church has to generate guilt so that people come to church to seek forgiveness. It’s a cynical, but interesting point of view.

But just in case you think this is just my experience, and I am exaggerating, here are some quotes taken recently from a 15-minute search of Christian forums:

“I am addicted to self-pleasure, and I don’t know if any man would accept me”.

“Through therapy I have come to realize that I perceive all attraction as lust and objectification. I have rejected multiple men over the years because of it, and I even realized I have intentionally not put care into my physical appearance to be less approachable.”

“My parents taught me any sexual experience before marriage was taboo. I was closely monitored when I had a relationship in high school and I would be looked down on if they thought I had done anything sexual. My brother got to do whatever he wanted though. Parents cared but didn’t force it on him really.

So now I am actually somewhat afraid to have sex. I was supposed to be married to have it, so I don’t have any real experience whatsoever. I’m 22 and I’m still afraid of doing the deed all the way with anyone.”

“Oh yeah, the guilt was heavy. I de-converted my sophomore year of high school, and am only recently coming to terms that sex and masturbation are pretty normal things that people do and are just facts of life. I know some people that consider anything remotely sexual disgusting and wrong”

“I’m 35 now and don’t feel like I can relate to a lot of the rest of society when it comes to sex and relationships. Anxiety, shame, fear, guilt, plenty of other things, it all comes from being brought to up believe that I was an evil monster for even having a sexuality.”

But where does this all come from?

To be blunt – it doesn’t come from the Bible. The Bible set out some boundaries for misuse of sexuality – abuse, exploitation, incest, bestiality, adultery, sexual ritualism in the worship of idols etc. But today’s anxiety has nothing to do with that. No, this comes from the influence of ancient Greek philosophy, Middle Eastern pagan religion and Gnosticism which influenced the church fathers in the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4th centuries.

The belief that the body was corrupt and the spiritual world pure lies at the root of this stronghold. Its roots are Gnosticism, Stoicism, Manichaeism, and Platonic thought.

Hebrew scriptures have always integrated the body and the spirit/soul. Christianity in the first century was very physical – Jesus came in the flesh and lived amongst us. He was not some ethereal spirit, nor some asexual being. He was fully human and had the same sexual nature we have. He healed the mind, soul (emotions) and spirit as well as the body.

Hebrew scripture celebrated sexual pleasure. God calls creation “very good”. He mandated multiplication. He instigated the “one flesh” which is joining in marriage.

The suspicion of sexuality that had begun to emerge in parts of the church after the 2nd century culminated in the writings of Augustine of Hippo in the 4^th century which set the tone for the rest of church history.

Augustine changed the Christian view of sex from being “very good” to something spiritually suspect. Sex now needed to justify itself through procreation. Even pleasure within marriage carried the stain of sin.

At this time, to be spiritual was to be celibate; a spiritual man didn’t indulge in pleasure. He was self-controlled, he mastered and suppressed his earthly desires. The not-so-subtle belief was that the more ascetic you were the more spiritual brownie points you got with God. The married man was considered to be a compromised man, a weak and carnal man. A married woman was even considered a prostitute by one of the church fathers:

“As long as a woman is for bearing children, she differs from a prostitute only in name.”
— Jerome, Against Jovinian I.47

Tertullian (155 – 220 AD) famously called women “the devil’s gateway,” De Cultu Feminarum, Book 1, Chapter 1.

This was pure legalism. The idea that you were spiritually justified by harsh treatment of the body was something Paul refuted strongly in Galatians:

“Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” Colossians 2:23

But such is the importation of dualism into modern society that 1700 years later, an 18 year old becomes a Christian in the United Kingdom and without having ever heard of Tertullian, or Jerome, or read a single thing they or Augustine ever said, instinctively absorbed the key take away from their writings. To be spiritual meant to be asexual. Dualism is not just embedded in Christian culture; it is embedded in our Western culture.

Our very language around sexuality reflects the sense of sex as shameful, or morally contaminating. Our language talks about sexuality in terms of being “naughty”, “dirty”, “sinful.” Desire is treated as “lust”.

But what happens when this “yoke” is removed? When you deconstruct the yoke of guilt and shame about sexuality that early church fathers put onto the church? What happens when you start to integrate a healthy idea of sexuality into your spiritual identity?

Well speaking from personal experience, the most significant immediate impact is that I no longer carry moral anxiety about sexual feelings or thoughts or deeds. In Christian spaces I no longer feel contamination, shame or guilt. Bizarrely, moral anxiety has been such an ever-present part of my experience as a Christian, that without it, I even began to wonder whether I was still saved!

It has led me to circle back and ask what is it that distinguishes a Christian from a non-Christian. In the Old Testament Moses describes that distinction as the presence of God. He pleads with God to go up with the Israelites, and says without your presence we are indistinguishable from everyone else in the world:

“What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” Exodus 33:15-16.

Jesus doesn’t change this, but he adds a new characteristic – love:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Tragically, the one characteristic that sets out modern Christians from non-Christians today is not the presence of God among them, nor the way they love one another, but moral anxiety about sexuality.

It is time for a reformation of the church in this area, back to Hebraic integration of healthy sexuality as part of healthy spirituality.

Sign up for more articles and thoughts about how we do this, and buy the book which is a starting point for understanding where we have gone wrong – historically, theologically and in our teaching on sexuality.

There is a better way!

The pattern becomes clearer when Paul’s instructions are placed beside the social expectations of the Roman household. Again and again, Paul addresses issues that were already central to Roman ideals of female respectability: modesty, submission, domestic order, sexual honour, and public restraint. The striking question is not simply that Paul gives these instructions, but that he often anchors them in creation, law, or divine order.

Roman social expectation:

Women must be quiet, modest and submissive

Paul’s instruction:

“A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man.” 1 Tim 2: 11-12

Appeal to divine order:

Eve was deceived. Adam was formed first. Genesis 2-3.

Later church use:

Women are banned from teaching in many churches today

Roman social expectation:

Female modesty and restraint

Paul’s instruction:
“The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves just as the Law also says. If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.” 1 Cor 14:34

Appeal to divine order:

Appeal to the law.

Later church use:

Most churches ignore this. They find ways to argue this away as context so as not to practice it.

Roman social expectation:

Head coverings were widely understood within the honour-shame culture of the eastern Roman world as markers of female respectability, marital status, and social propriety.

Paul’s instruction:

“But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying, disgraces her head.” 1 Cor 11:5

Appeal to divine order:

“For a man ought not to have his head covered as he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake but woman for the man’s sake.” I Cor 11: 8-9

Later church use:

Women’s head covering remains a requirement in certain churches today. For other’s this is argued away as cultural practice.

Roman social expectation:

Respectable modest appearance

Paul’s instruction:

“Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly, and discretely, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.” I Tm 2: 9-10

Appeal to divine order:

Peter links this back to Sarah and Abraham in 1Peter 3: 5

“For in this way (i.e. with good works) in former times the holy women also, who hoped in God, used to adorn themselves, being submissive to their own husbands….”

Later church use:

Certain churches do not permit makeup or jewellery. But most churches discard this but encourage women not to wear provocative or revealing clothing.

Roman social expectation:

Wifely submission

Paul’s instruction:

“Wives be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as Christ is head of the church, He himself being saviour of the body.”

Appeal to divine order:

“For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh. This mystery is great but I am speaking in reference to Christ and the church. Eph 5: 31-32

Later church use:

In many churches women are taught to obey and submit to their husbands in a hierarchy within marriage. Others, this is argued away as cultural.

Roman social expectation:

The management of the oikos (household) as a public and private duty on women.

Paul’s instruction

A consistent pattern in Paul’s letters of women attending to their domestic chores as a spiritual task:

“Older women likewise are to be…so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonoured.”

Appeal to divine order:

Paul locates hierarchy in natural divine order. “For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake but woman for the man’s sake.” I Cor 11: 8-9

Later church use:
Many churches regard women working with some suspicion, promote women’s role as stay-at-home mothers.

Paul’s Household Codes:

The “household codes” found in Paul’s letters—directives regarding headship, submission, and domestic roles—did not exist in a vacuum. They mirror the established expectations of the Roman paterfamilias system. In Roman culture, the domestic sphere was the foundation of the state. A wife was expected to be quiet, modest, and subordinate to ensure family honour and social stability.

The Roman household was headed by the paterfamilias, the husband, who had legal authority over his wife, children, household and slaves. The wife was subject to the husband.

The ideal married woman (matrona) was expected to embody a number of recognised virtues.

Public Conduct

• Quiet and restrained in public.

• Respectful rather than outspoken.

• Avoid public behaviour that could bring shame on the household.

• Demonstrate modesty and dignity.

Marriage

• Faithful to her husband.

• Honour her husband’s social standing.

• Support the stability and reputation of the household.

Domestic Role

• Manage the home.

• Oversee servants (if wealthy).

• Raise children.

• Be identified primarily with domestic life rather than public leadership.

Appearance

A respectable woman was expected to signal virtue through her appearance.

She should:

• Dress modestly.

• Avoid ostentatious luxury.

• Wear socially respectable hairstyles.

• Present herself as sexually respectable.

Hair, clothing and jewellery communicated moral character.

Sexual Morality

The ideal Roman wife displayed:

• chastity (castitas)

• modesty (pudicitia)

• faithfulness (fides)

Female sexual behaviour was understood to protect the honour of the entire household.

How Paul Universalized the Temporary

When we examine Paul’s writings, we see that he consistently reinforced these cultural norms and consistently linked them back to God’s original design. By doing this he consistently elevates a specific cultural practice into a universal law or theological mandate.

Paul also states that all are equal in Christ, but his teachings support a social hierarchy that is certainly not equal in rights, duties, roles or privileges.

Although Paul also teaches some universal principles such as grace, freedom from law, the law of love etc – he also spends much of his teaching giving rules to a specific people in a very specific social and historical context. He gives us rules about head covering, what women can do in church, who can teach, what sort of adornment women should wear, how women should behave in the family, how to manage an offering, how to take the bread and wine, whether you can eat meat dedicated to idols at the market, whether you should deprive each other sexually or not, when you should marry, how husbands should treat wives and vice versa, how you should treat your slaves, or your master if you are a slave etc.

So what is Paul doing? It is clear that he is seeking to translate the Kingdom into a specific social context – a Roman first-century one. He is setting up rules that make sense in that context and that society. His goal was to establish godly order to ensure that Christians are disciplined, constructive citizens in the eyes of the empire. He is speaking primarily as a missionary, building an orderly community to be a good witness, respected by its neighbours, a city on a hill.

In another jarring example – the social injustice of slavery – we again see that Paul does not challenge the status quo, he absorbs the church into it. He sends Onesimus back to his slave master Philemon with an appeal for him to treat him well. For centuries Christians cited this as a reason to support the slave trade.

To be fair to Paul, he also does challenge some of the unjust Roman cultural norms. Notably, he departs from Roman marriage customs in his insistence on the mutuality of sexual pleasure between husband and wife (1 Corinthians 7), the importance of husbands loving their wives as Christ did the church (Eph 5), and in the encouragement of masters to be kind to their slaves. He also takes a stance against the socially accepted practice of using prostitutes for sex (1 Cor 6), which would have also included, by default – not explicitly stated but certainly something that changed, having sex with your slaves.

These are not just rules, these are gender roles and a cultural framing of how women are meant to be, including their sexuality.

The Fork in the Road:

In almost all of these instances Paul legitimated his rulings by appealing to divine order in Genesis or the law. We can only assume that he did this because appealing to God’s design was by far the most legitimate way to settle the argument. But it is also likely that as someone in the culture, he did not recognise the extent to which he was doing this. Much like British missionaries who imposed their own English moral and cultural standards on Africans.

But if we accept that he literally appealed to universal principles to legitimise cultural norms around gender roles, and morality, then we have a fork in the road.

Either we recognise that most of Christian teaching in this area is basically Roman social mores from the first-century dressed up with divine legitimacy, or, we buy into it all as authoritative divine revelation – with no exceptions. We cannot pick and choose which bits of divine universal order applies if it is divine universal order.

And this is exactly the problem with the debate we have today between egalitarians and complementarians. They are arguing over how to interpret the writings of Paul. Complementarians are arguing for a prima facie reading that locks these rules into divine created order. Egalitarians also accept the rules as divinely inspired, but are trying to fit the statements of Paul into something more palatable for modern culture – usually by pointing out the contradictions and other passages that imply there is some leniency here, or cultural context there.

But what if both are wrong? What is the whole framework itself is founded on a misreading of what Paul was doing? Our Protestant approach to Scripture — sola scriptura — has treated Scripture as the final authority, but in practice it has often encouraged us to read Paul’s letters with a high degree of literalism, as though every pastoral instruction were direct, timeless divine legislation.

But the problem is that today’s society is vastly different from the first-century Roman world. We live in a democratic, more equal and rights-based society. The redistribution of wealth through social welfare, access to education and employment opportunities have reduced hierarchical inequalities between men and women. Instead of belonging to their father or husband, women have legal and social autonomy and freedom that was never part of Paul’s world. Today women vote, they lead multimillion dollar companies, govern countries, they fight in wars, run churches, they can out earn men. Our society is so much the better for it.

Paul’s social instructions were expressions of Kingdom values within a Roman culture, not necessarily permanent expressions of those values for every culture. Paul translated the Kingdom into Roman society. The church often mistook the translation for the Kingdom itself.

The question is this – if Paul was seeking to translate the principles of the Kingdom into 21^st century European and American societies – would he necessarily be coming up with the exact same rules as he did then? Would he be trying to impose a first-century Roman model of femininity on women today?

What is absolutely striking and extraordinary in the contrast between Paul and Jesus’ teaching: – Jesus never located his teaching in a specific culture or time. What he says is extraordinary because it speaks universally to all societies in all times. He speaks in first-order Kingdom principles: love God, love your neighbour, forgive, serve, show mercy, seek justice, do not dominate others, become like children, take the lowest place. He uplifted women above their cultural place in 1^st century Israel. Paul, by contrast, often writes as a missionary-pastor applying those Kingdom principles to concrete communities in Corinth, Ephesus, Crete, and Rome.

Jesus and Paul were doing different things. Jesus proclaims the Kingdom; Paul helps communities embody it within particular social worlds.

So, once we understand Paul and Jesus properly, the question is no longer, “Which of Paul’s first-century rules or cultural values remain binding?” It becomes, “What Kingdom principles was Paul trying to express, and how should those same principles be expressed in our own culture?”

When English missionaries went to Africa for the first time, in some places they tried to ban women from showing their breasts because in English culture this was considered indecent and sexual. This offended the Africans because in their culture breasts were not sexual, but thighs were. The Kingdom principle of decency looks different in each culture. Equally, what is “decently and in order” in 21^st century Europe and America does not look the same as it did in the 1^st century Roman world.

The error we have made in adopting everything Paul said as the eternal word of God has had severe and enduring consequences. First century patriarchy has been passed on down the centuries to women because this was believed to be the divine order. Women have suffered as second class citizens within Western society and church for generations. Women’s sexuality has been tightly controlled, and culturally constrained to meet the expectations in Paul’s writings. The effects are still felt palpably today. Christian women suffer rates of vaginismus twice as high as their non-Christian peers, and greater difficulties achieving orgasm (“The Great Sex Rescue” by Sheila Wray Gregoire).

We need a whole new interpretive lens to this debate on gender but also sexuality and other wider issues. If Paul translated the Kingdom faithfully into his world, then our task is not simply to preserve his Roman applications, but to ask how the same Kingdom should be embodied in ours. We should be free to re-examine all the assumptions he made in scripture and go back to asking what is the culture of the Kingdom, and what does it look like in our society. The social expectations and rules of Rome do not bind us. The Kingdom does.

Endnotes

1. The Roman matrona and female respectability.
The ideal Roman matrona was associated with pudicitia — sexual modesty/chastity — together with respectable dress, marital fidelity, dignity and behaviour that protected the honour of the household. Roman discourse sharply contrasted the respectable matrona with sexually disreputable women. See Rebecca Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially her treatment of pudicitia; and Anise K. Strong, Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Cambridge Resolve

2. Modesty, domesticity and reputation.
Roman female virtue was not merely private. A woman’s modesty, chastity and domestic behaviour contributed to the public reputation of her family and household. Scholarship on Roman gender repeatedly identifies domesticity, sexual integrity and modest conduct as interlocking ideals of respectable femininity. Cambridge University Press

3. Clothing, jewellery and braided hair.
Paul’s instructions in 1 Timothy 2:9–10 and 1 Peter 3:3 concerning modest clothing, braided hair, gold, pearls and costly dress have clear parallels in Greco-Roman moral discourse about respectable female appearance. Alicia Batten notes that the ideal Roman matron was conventionally portrayed as modestly dressed, restrained and obedient, and argues that these New Testament instructions echo longstanding cultural emphasis on female modesty and domestic virtue. See Alicia J. Batten, “Neither Gold nor Braided Hair (1 Timothy 2.9; 1 Peter 3.3): Adornment, Gender and Honour in Antiquity,” New Testament Studies 55 (2009). Cambridge University Press

4. Head coverings and female honour.
Veiling and head covering could function in the Roman Mediterranean as markers of respectable female status, sexual unavailability and pudicitia. The precise practice differed by place, status and period, so 1 Corinthians 11 should not be reduced to a single universal Roman dress rule; nevertheless, female head covering clearly participated in the wider honour-language of respectable womanhood. Cambridge University Press

5. Household codes were not invented by Christians.
The New Testament “household codes” belong within a much older Greco-Roman tradition of ethical teaching about the management of the household — husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and slaves. New Testament scholarship has long compared Colossians, Ephesians, 1 Peter and the Pastorals with this broader tradition of oikonomia or household management. See Margaret Y. MacDonald, “Beyond Identification of the Topos of Household Management,” New Testament Studies 57 (2011), and David L. Balch’s work on Greco-Roman moralists and the household codes. Cambridge University Press

6. The Roman household and the paterfamilias.
Roman society conceptualised the household hierarchically around the male householder or paterfamilias. Early Christian discussions of husbands, wives, children and slaves therefore took place inside an already established social structure rather than against a blank cultural canvas. Cambridge’s recent history of ancient Christianity describes the Roman family as organised around the paterfamilias, while scholarship on Pauline household codes explicitly examines Christianity’s adaptation of those conventions. Cambridge University Press

7. An important legal qualification.
The statement that a Roman husband simply possessed legal authority over his wife needs some qualification. In older manus marriage a wife could be legally subordinated to her husband, but by the late Republic and early Empire sine manu marriage had become common, in which a wife did not pass into her husband’s legal power. Roman patriarchy was real, but the precise legal position of wives varied according to marriage form, status and period. See Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford University Press, 1991). Cambridge’s treatment of Roman private law likewise notes that manus specifically applied to wives joined through the older formal forms of marriage.

So let’s start with Augustine. He taught that sexual pleasure was itself a disordered sinful state that emerged from the fall of man. Augustine took the ordinary Latin word concupiscentia and transformed it into one of the defining theological concepts of Western Christianity. Sexual desire itself became evidence of humanity’s fallen condition. Sexual pleasure went from being something God declared good in Genesis and celebrated in the Song of Songs – to a deep moral failure and sin. For Augustine, not only would it be wrong to employ a fantasy to enhance your sexual pleasure, it would even be wrong to have sexual pleasure for its own sake – including within marriage.

“Intercourse in marriage, then, when undertaken to beget children, carries no blame. When indulged to satisfy lust, so long as it is with a married partner, it bears only venial blame because it preserves fidelity to the marriage-bed.” (De Bono Coniugali – On the Good of Marriage)

And that is where a lot of modern conservative frameworks and teachings about sex have a soft echo of Augustine. “By all means have sex and enjoy it in marriage, but don’t become “lustful”, don’t enjoy it “too much”, be spiritual, and whatever you do ensure it is only centred on your husband.” Anything else becomes lustful and sinful.

Let’s move to consider the role of fantasy in sexual life. Erotic fantasies are symbolic rather than literal. They rarely represent what a person actually wants to happen. They explore power, vulnerability, being desired, surrender, freedom, novelty, or significance through the language of erotic imagination. Reading fantasy literally is often as mistaken as reading dreams literally. As Esther Perel – and most sexologists acknowledge – erotic imagination is an essential part of healthy human sexuality. As I explain in my book, the erotic imagination is the “erotic fuel” that sustains monogamous long-term relationships. Esther Perel herself describes fantasy as one of the psyche’s most remarkable creative capacities. She describes being continually amazed by the way that fantasy transforms what we lack or need in real life into some sort of inverted mental escape that compensates for that unmet need.

To give examples – a woman who spends her whole life looking after other people, meeting everyone else’s needs, dying to self, putting others first, who rarely has a moment to herself, and who often feels overlooked or undesired in real life – transforms herself into the exact opposite in her fantasies. In her fantasies she becomes this amazingly attractive woman at the centre of lots of male attention, highly desired by men who do everything to please her. She is the centre of a gang bang, in control, being served by these gorgeous men – all desiring her. In her erotic imagination, she doesn’t have to please anyone else; she is the one being pleased.

Sexologists tell us that our fantasies often serve to compensate us for real emotional and psychological needs.

Fantasies, as Perel points out, are also often both highly transgressive and most of the time not something we would actually want to act out. In fact, most fantasies are exactly that – an erotic escape, into a world of freedom, not a preparation for action. But they do something simultaneously healing and transformative to the person.

But this is not how mainstream Christian teaching sees it. Founded on fear-based ideas about sexuality, focused on gatekeeping and sin, it has completely detached itself from disciplines like psychology or sexology or even biology. Mainstream conservative Christian teaching would teach that she was sinning, and that her fantasy was highly shameful. The belief would be that this is completely inconsistent with godly female sexuality, which has to be focused on serving her husband alone. Any thought of other men (even imaginary men) is mental adultery.

Mainstream Christian teaching would insist that she restrict her sexual fantasises to her husband, and would encourage her to keep it fairly vanilla and romantic. They would tell her to repent of wild transgressive fantasies, to suppress them as dangerous. As a result, she will learn to carry shame and feel that her identity as a Christian woman is imperilled by this. She learns from a young age that she should shrink her sexuality into the mould chosen for her – that of a chaste woman. Or in other words – a woman who carries out her marital duties, but certainly not one who masturbates or has her own secret fantasy life.

A woman in her 30s once said in house group that if someone projected all the thoughts she had had in the week on a screen at church on a Sunday, she would feel deeply horrified and ashamed. This was in fact the house group leader’s wife. A woman of good character, who was kind, caring, looked after people, a thoroughly decent and good human being. So, one has to ask what is it that would cause so much shame? I can only assume she was making reference to sexualised thoughts. Private erotic thoughts that she had been taught were shameful, transgressive in that culture, but which were almost certainly common, healthy and profoundly human.

Because right at the heart of Christian teaching is a spiritual – body dualism. Spirituality and sexuality are at opposite poles.

But let’s ask what happens when a woman does what evangelical culture has asked of her – and she suppresses her desires? She struggles to get aroused in the bedroom for her husband because she has learned that her own desires are dangerous. Sex is often a duty to please him. This becomes lifeless and boring over time. Her husband is as unsatisfied by this lack of passion as she is.

Alternatively, if women are given cultural permission to be sexual – to be themselves – what happens? She integrates her sexuality with her spirituality, not by going to a gang bang – but by bringing her passion and desires into the bedroom where it becomes erotic fuel for the marriage. The couple have more explosive sex, more honestly, more openness and much closer communication and appreciation of each other. Fantasy is not the opposite of faithfulness. For many couples it is one of the ways faithfulness remains erotically alive over decades.

So, can a spiritual person have transgressive sexual fantasies? Yes – it is part of our very humanity - why not?! What does it say about our core theological framework that this question even feels impossible to ask?

If we understood the role and significance of erotic imagination, and used it constructively, we would feel less shame and feel less at war with our spiritual lives at church. We might have better marriages, be happier and have healthier more integrated relationships with each other and God.

The erotic imagination is a powerful transformative life force created by God Himself, not a dirty secret.


Below is a fascinating discussion about the role of erotic imagination between Gillian Anderson, Actress and Esther Perel, Relationship Counsellor and Sexologist.

Esther Perel and Gillian Anderson discussion the meaning of erotic fantasy.

Indeed, in some churches we are told that sex is not even an actual “need” because you won’t die without it.

But what happens when people are not happy sexually?

People suffer in silence for a while. Eventually they start to meet that need in other ways - outside their core relationship. The intimacy and connection between couples wanes, while distance and resentment grow. They start living separate lives. They have no language to talk about the issue. Desires become compartmentalised. Children grow up in homes, where there is distance and silence, not warmth and affection between their parents.

Eventually we see people having affairs, other times secret outlets – happy ending massages, pornography, prostitution or sometimes seeking divorce. But for some people - nothing, just a slow lonely death inside.

For many Christian couples — like the ones surveyed in Sheila Gregoires’ “The Great Sex Rescue” — sex can become about duty, obligation. The wife’s obligation to meet his sexual needs, rather than something mutually satisfying. Although good sex can be amazing, intense, body shaking and deeply emotional, deeply nourishing — it can also become routine, dull, and boring. After enough experiences like that, one partner can just lose interest, and check out.

In many long-term monogamous marriages, intimacy slowly dies on the vine. Some couples stop having sex altogether, and one partner starts to feel trapped in an enforced celibacy that they did not choose and was never part of the initial deal. Unable to divorce, unable to go outside the marriage, for religious reasons, they become trapped. They become roommates – unhappy ones.

Research tells us, for many men, sexless marriages lead to feeling deeply unloved, depression, low self-esteem, emotional shut down, increased risk of chronic health problems and lower life expectancy.

Everything that the church warns us against – sexual sin, divorce - becomes more likely because we have lost the joy of the erotic, of deeply satisfying and nourishing sexual communion. But even more profound is the loss of connection, of vitality, of life and wellbeing in the marriage and lives of the individuals. Feeling refreshed, renewed, healed and alive. People who leave dead bedroom relationships often talk about not feeling “alive”. So, what is it that they felt in those relationships?

Conservative Christianity treats sexuality like a liability, a dangerous fire to be carefully suppressed, managed and controlled. Not as a source of life. Not as a powerful divine life force that gives us deep physical and emotional refreshment and wellbeing, and essential to the flourishing of the individual and their core intimate relationship. If it did, it would also allow permission to live whatever it took to rekindle that flame, even if this meant breaking “the rules”.

The Hebraic world had a strong value for the erotic, for pleasure and sexual joy.

In fact, the Hebraic world – which gave us the Song of Songs – embraces sexual pleasure in ways that are completely alien to traditional Christianity. Let me repeat that – completely alien to modern conservative Christianity.

To quote the opening chapter of “The Yoke We Were Never Meant To Bear”:

“In Jewish law, marital sex is not treated as a concession to weakness but as a mitzvah—a positive, sacred obligation. The focus of marital intimacy is explicitly the woman’s pleasure, and the responsibility rests primarily on the husband to ensure that sex is consensual, joyful, and satisfying for her. A man who has sex with his wife without regard for her desire or enjoyment is understood to have failed in his moral duty. Sexual intimacy is celebrated as a good in itself, independent of procreation, and is woven into the rhythm of religious life as a source of joy, bonding, and blessing.”

To illustrate how differently the Hebraic world thinks about sex let us turn to one of many examples of rabbinical stories:

“The masters of the day were distressed. Adultery was spreading as plague among the people. The authorities were at a loss as to how to curb this powerful drive. Finally, driven to desperation, they began to pray. For three days they prayed, fasting and weeping, pleading with God, ‘Let us slay the sexual drive before it slays us’.

Finally, God acquiesced. The masters then witnessed a lion of fire leap out of the Temple’s Holy of Holies. A prophet among them identified the lion as the personification of the primal sexual drive.

They sought to slay the lion of fire. But the result was that for three days the entire society ground to a standstill. Hens did not lay eggs, artists ceased creating, businesses faltered, and all spiritual activity came to a halt.

Realising that the sex drive was about more than sex, that it somehow echoes with the Divine, the masters relented.

They prayed that only its destructive shadow be removed while retaining its creative force. Their request was denied on high with the insightful response: ‘You cannot have only half a drive’. The greater the sacred power of a quality, the greater its shadow; the two are inseparable. So they prayed that the lion at least be weakened, and their prayer was granted. The lion, less potent but no less present, re-entered the Holy of Holies. (Talmud—Mas. Yoma 69b, quoted in Gafni 2003,7)

Eros is the life force that animates desire, creativity, connection, vitality, and relational aliveness.

If we compare this with the New Testament, we see sex described — even at its most positive — as a concession to prevent sin. Far more often when the Bible mentioned sexuality it was in the form of a warning against immorality.

The Greeks had a number of words to describe love, Agapē: self-giving love, Philia: friendship/affection, Storgē: family affection and Erōs: erotic sexual love. But the New Testament never uses the word eros — why?

I think that there are two reasons for this. Firstly, Paul was writing to a church in a time of crisis, under persecution and expecting Jesus to return imminently in their lifetimes. Clearly erotic life and getting married was low on the order of urgent priorities.

Secondly, eros was a difficult subject for Christian writers to discuss because eros was a Greek god. In Greek thought gods were less of an external entity that you prayed to and more of a spirit that you engaged with through action. So, engaging in erotic pleasure was to commune with the god of Eros himself. In the same way, to party, drink and dance, maybe cavort and have sex was a participation in the god of Dionysus. Early Christians may therefore have avoided that language deliberately.

Paul was a Jew from a Hebraic culture where sexuality was already embedded and understood as integral to spirituality. Jesus – a Jew first and foremost – was also part of the same sex-positive religious culture. So, there was probably an unspoken understanding that erotic love was a given. It didn’t need restating. In fact, what we see is Paul firefighting crisis with these new converts trying to teach them not to misuse or abuse sexuality. The absence of eros in the letters should not therefore be read as evidence that erotic love is of no importance to Christian life.

Today the church is capable of teaching you how not to sin but it is not capable of teaching you how to flourish sexually. It does not give people a language for desire, or for expressing their needs. It confines sexuality to a very narrow moral container that doesn’t suit everyone. If you don’t fit in to it, you will feel that your spirituality and your sexuality are at odds with each other.

Pastors are trained in moral gatekeeping and containment, but not in how to promote and sustain a satisfying, nourishing, sexually joyful and pleasurable sexual life. The vast majority of pastors have no training in human biology, sexology or psychology. In fact, many of them are inherently suspicious of these fields.

If we want to feel truly alive, to feel deeply and intimately connected with our partner, to feel wanted, desired, needed, and emotionally and sexually satisfied, deeply refreshed and healthy, we need to rediscover the value of the erotic in life. We need to reclaim the vision of sexuality as a life-giving force which we see in Hebraic scripture.

I will leave you with a quote from Chapter 2 of the Yoke We Were Never Meant to Bear (pages 11- 12):

“Sexual pleasure is not incidental. God wove pleasure into the very centre of sexual union. Sexual pleasure is the means by which bodies communicate safety, delight, belonging, and mutual presence. Pleasure functions as the body’s primary affirmation that connection is good, that intimacy is safe, and that mutual presence is life-giving.

In this sense, sex is nourishing. It strengthens attachment, deepens bonding, restores connection, and communicates love beyond words. It is life-giving not only biologically, but also emotionally and relationally. It binds people together through joy, touch, vulnerability, and shared delight.

Seen this way, sex reflects something true about God Himself. This understanding of sex as nourishing and life-giving is echoed in Israel’s wisdom tradition. Proverbs speaks of sexual intimacy using the imagery of water and sustenance:

“Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well…May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.”

(Proverbs 5:15, 18)

I wrote this book after a crisis that forced me to confront a question I could no longer ignore. Whilst on a long holiday in New Zealand, a podcast challenged me to ask what I would regret at the end of my life if I did not change it now.

Every decision I had taken I was satisfied with - my decision to marry, my wife, our children, my career, my decision to follow Jesus, and our decision to emigrate country despite the challenges. But one thing sat as a dull ache in my chest: the quality, intensity and aliveness of intimacy in our marriage.

We had married young. In love. Committed to Christ. We had kept all the rules, no sex before marriage. And after marriage, we had kept all the rules too. Somehow after 30 years something was missing. It wasn’t just lack of intimacy, it was a lack of aliveness.

I began exploring ways we might bring more life, honesty and freedom into our intimacy. Trying to introduce more life in the bedroom immediately hit a wall. The religious police who lived in our heads were surveilling everything we did in bed. Almost nothing escaped their scrutiny. Fantasies had to be strictly focused on one’s partner, romantic and vanilla. Anything else was sexual immorality, impurity, sin.

We didn’t have a language or space to express our desires honestly. These were locked away in the basement. Hidden by shame, by moral disapproval, suppressed, or expressed only in secret.

The most important thing we had learned from the church was not how to flourish sexually and relationally, but how to avoid sinning. And the best way to do this apparently was to self survey and close down desire and the erotic imagination.

So I asked my wife if we could throw the religious police out of our bedroom once and for all. But this question forced us to confront religious conditioning. A conditioning that refused us moral permission to change the rules. Rules that were there to prevent us from sinning but which were slowly suffocating us. Since neither of us could agree on what was allowed, we suddenly found ourselves plunged into a relational crisis that we had to navigate.

I went for a walk - a long walk with God. I had a conversation with Him and in my grief I asked Him “God, why are you so negative about sex?”

He didn’t reply immediately, but within days I had my response. He wasn’t. This book is the summary of the core things I learnt, that He showed me.

What followed surprised me.

As I dived into research I expected God to reinforce what I had always been taught. Instead, as I began examining the evidence, many of the assumptions I had inherited without question started to fall apart. Convictions that had been presented as unquestionable biblical truths turned out to rest on foundations far shakier than I had ever imagined. Some emerged from cultural traditions, philosophical influences, and historical developments that lay far beyond the pages of the Bible itself.

The deeper I dug into the scholarship, the more I found myself asking not simply, “What does the Church teach?” but, “Where did this teaching come from, and does it accurately reflect the heart of God?”

Most surprising of all was what I discovered about God’s attitude toward sex itself. Far from being negative about sexual pleasure, I came to believe that God’s vision is richer, more joyful and more life-giving than I had ever been taught.

The things I learned brought a new honesty, deeper communication, and fresh life to our marriage.

If you'd like to explore the evidence for yourself, Chapter 1 is available as a free download below.

It sets out the central argument of the book and examines some of the evidence that led me to question assumptions I had accepted for most of my life.

I hope you find it thought-provoking.
📖 Download Chapter 1 (PDF)

Prefer listening to reading? You can also listen to a free podcast-style discussion of Chapters 1 below.

It explores the central themes of the opening chapter breaking it down into an accessible conversation:

You can also listen to the companion discussion here:
🎧 Watch / Listen on YouTube

Martin