We Should be More Careful With Sex Typology for Christ and the Church

In a post-#MeToo, post-#ChurchToo context, Christians should be careful how they employ Christ-church typology as it relates to sex. Yes, it is the case that theologians throughout the church’s history, taking their cue from Eph 5:25–31, have connected sex to salvation and the Christ-church relationship. It is also the case that rank misogyny has been a consistent feature of Christian theology. When theological analogies about sex mix with dehumanizing attitudes about sex, things can get dangerous quickly. Today, scandals of sexual abuse are tragically commonplace in the church, and, as I argue in my upcoming book, Non-Toxic Masculinity, purity culture and an idiosyncratically evangelical obsession with sex are at least partially to blame.

Yes, sex is a life-giving and beautiful picture both of God’s trinitarian love and the Christ-church relationship. However, it is only an image of these realities. If we aren’t careful when using this metaphor, we may find that our way of speaking about sex and God become, like our vision of sex in general, male-centered and dehumanizing. Other dynamics than the possible soteriological typology should be carefully considered here––things like the prevalence of sexual violence in Christian communities, sexual degradation, and the embodied power advantages men have in sexual encounters. For instance, too many Christian theologies of sex fixate on the significance of male orgasm and the life-giving power of the man’s seed. Too many Christian theologies of sex reduce women to their potential to receive the man’s seed and create a child.

Some readers may feel that I am denying the theological legitimacy of an analogy that scripture itself points to. Not at all. I’m cautioning that, in the wrong minds and hands, hyper-spiritualized, hyper-sexualized language can be used by would-be abusers to justify and rationalize their sins against women and children. It’s not out of bounds to reflect theologically on sex and how it connects to the Christ-church relationship, but it’s something we should do very carefully in these days of evangelical crisis and scandal.

A decade ago, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on “Sex and Sacrament,” with particular focus on Jesus’ words at the institution of the Lord’s Supper, “this is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19). In this paper I noted how John Calvin and many other theologians in church history drew connections, not only between marriage and the Christ-church relationship, but the act of sex and the Christ-church relationship. 

At that point in my life, sexual shame was a constant companion. I felt I needed to see some profound theological beauty in the bodily mechanics of sex to soothe the feelings of guilt around my own sexual desire. Given what scripture says, there’s nothing wrong with this necessarily, but looking back now I can see how my theological preoccupation with sex showed an unhealthy preoccupation with sex in general, cultivated in me by a strange mixture of purity resources, a hyper-sexualized culture, pornography, and the raging hormones of Bible college student life. As it turns out, my undergraduate self didn’t need to do more heady and hyper-spiritual theologizing about sex. I needed to cultivate healthier attitudes and practices toward my sexuality, my body, and women’s bodies.

The biblical and theological legitimacy of the Christ-church/marriage analogy does not justify reckless use of the metaphor. If you press it too far or move from the abstract to the concrete, you can get into trouble––and frankly, nonsense––pretty quickly. Any image or metaphor may break down when pressed. That doesn’t mean it’s an illegitimate analogy; it may just mean we’re overusing it. Yes, sex in marriage may “refer” to Christ and the Church (Eph 5:31), but if both sex and the cross are in a certain sense holy ground, we should tread carefully upon them. In expounding this “mystery,” Paul exhorts Christian husbands to care for their wives (vv. 28–29), looking to Christ’s giving of himself for the benefit of his bride (vv. 25–27). But this does not mean that everything that's true about sex is true about the Christ-Church relationship, or vice versa. Nor does it mean that we have free rein to say anything we want about how the intimate details of sex are connected to salvation. This is a basic principle of metaphor theory that I’ve learned as part of my PhD research in New Testament studies. Saying “X is like Y” is not the same thing as saying “Y coherently and perfectly maps onto X in every way.”

Back in Ephesians 5, then, we can draw a clear contrast between the metaphor’s source domain (marriage) and its target domain (the Christ-church relationship). If this is narrowly about sexual intercourse, the analogy has already broken down. What some describe as the moment of “self-giving” for a man (i.e. orgasm) is one of pleasure. However, in direct contrast, the moment of self-giving for Christ (i.e. the cross) was one of agony and death.

This isn’t just about being theologically responsible and disciplined, however. It’s also a matter of reading the cultural moment. Evangelicals do not, it seems to me, occupy a moral position of strength as it relates to speaking about human sexuality. We have some house cleaning to do in this area. The solution to the hypersexuality in our culture and our churches may not be talking about sex more frequently or with more frankness. We may instead need to devote our intellectual energy to speaking about sex in more restrained and more humanizing ways, both for men and for women. If, for instance, when men are engaging in theological speculation about Christ-church typology, and Christian women respond quickly and forcefully that this reminds them of sexual violence and makes them feel uncomfortable, we should listen. Until Christian men begin to demonstrate a consistent sensitivity for how our ways of speaking about sex can make women feel unsafe, we are losing cultural trust rather than rebuilding it.

Changing the church’s culture around sex involves being more careful––not more edgy––in how we talk about and spiritualize sexuality. A need to constantly connect sex to the spiritual may betray a belief that the carnal realities of sex cannot be good in and of themselves. But Christianity is not a body-denigrating faith; it is a body-affirming faith. Perhaps more importantly, Christians should seek to create safe, non-misogynistic discourse around sex, which is something evangelical Christians have failed to do––and spectacularly so––in these recent decades.

Yes, let’s revel in the beauty both of sexual intimacy and Christ’s self-sacrificial love for his bride. Men, let the example of Christ’s concern for the church permeate the whole of your relationship with your wife, not just the moment of your orgasm. There is so much more to nourishing and caring for a wife than impregnating her. Going beyond what scripture actually says about this typology, fixating on the mechanics of sexual intercourse, dehumanizes a wife. It runs the risk of making the erotic and procreative the sum total of what it means to be human, which is certainly not what Paul intended. Perhaps, in our day, the better part of wisdom is heeding what Paul himself says––that the connection is “a profound mystery.” Maybe the details of how this typology works should be left, just that, mysterious. Or, at the very least, be explored in respectful dialogue between Christian men and women.

Again, it’s not out of bounds per se to connect sex to the Christ-church relationship. But we should remember that sex doesn’t need to be over-spiritualized for it to be a created good. Sometimes, we can just let sex be sex. Because, sometimes, the way we connect sex to salvation may reveal, more than anything else, the church’s unhealthy preoccupation with sex.