Full Contact Christianity

“Spiritual intimacy leads to physical intimacy.” I was told that a number of times growing up, by various parties in and around my church, but especially (and repeatedly) by a godly older couple I highly respected. Their practical application of that idea was a corollary to the Billy Graham rule: a man and a woman ought not to have serious conversations about deep spiritual things. Aside from your spouse, men ought to talk with men, and women with women, (or maybe couples with couples) and that’s that. (I’ve both written and said my piece about that error elsewhere, and won’t belabor it here.)

More recently, I had an unbelieving colleague with whom I did some very high-quality, very careful bodywork over a period of about a year. Everything was going well until one day, out of the blue, she began a conversation that turned into an invitation to adultery. To her dubious credit, she was very forthright: for her, being seen well and known well created sexual tension, which she wanted to relieve by taking our working relationship into the bedroom. I declined, which she certainly expected — the invitation was framed in a “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” kind of way — then I declined further contact, which seems to have surprised her; and when she continued to reach out to me, ultimately asked her not to contact me again.

Now, the same type of work I did with her, I’ve done with others of both genders over the years with no such difficulty. So what caused her to have such a problem? The same misbelief that the godly older couple in the first paragraph was suffering from: thinking that all intimacy is ultimately the same thing.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The world was formless and empty. God forms the world by dividing a series of contrasting pairs one from the other: light and darkness, sea and sky, dry land and sea. Then He fills the newly-divided world: the greater lights to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night, fish in the sea and birds in the sky, and land-dwelling animals. Then He signs the portrait: “male and female He created them.”

God created genuine variety, not a world of monist mush. Many of the different things He made are perichoretically related in surprising ways, but they are different things, each with its own glory. One of the fundamental truths about God and His creation (as Francis Schaeffer famously observed) is that all things are not the same to Him. He doesn’t just recognize distinctions; He literally makes distinctions. Christians ought to be automatically suspicious of any claim that starts out, “It’s all the same thing, man!”

One of the distinctions we ought to recognize is between a marriage and every other human relationship. Different kinds of relationships are different, each with its own unique glory. There’s not a single staircase of human relationship with casual interaction at the bottom and a marriage bed at the top, the only variable being how far up the stairs you climb with a particular person. Relationships differ in kind as well as degree. There’s more than one staircase, and they don’t all go to the same place.

This is something that Christians ought to already know: we will have eternity—literally all the time in the world—to know each other better. There’s not a single person on the New Earth that you won’t meet, and with that kind of time on our hands, we’ll all get to know each other very well indeed. As well as you can get to know your spouse in 50 or 60 years of successful marriage, that’s nothing to how well you’re going to know, say, Deborah or Samuel one day. And you still won’t end up married to them. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” like Jesus said.

Similarly, same-sex friendships like Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, are held out as examples of close friendship and love: a different kind, not a lesser degree, of relationship. Contemporary revisionist takes on those relationships (wrongheaded for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere) are actually a symptom of the very error we’re addressing. The revisionists’ inability to imagine a close relationship that’s not sexual is precisely the problem, and they’re projecting their own lack of imagination on everyone else.

Contemporary people think they live in a world of monist mush, and they’ve deified their lusts to the point that many of them will bed virtually anybody under a highly flexible ‘right’ set of circumstances. Many really do only have one relational staircase. That staircase leads inexorably to sexual intimacy, and every step below it is some combination of audition and foreplay, all the way down to a casual conversation with a stranger on the sidewalk. Which is kinda gross, if you think about it for a moment.

Framed that way, the failure of imagination is easy to see, and it ought not to surprise us that pagans would struggle in this way. It’s baked into their basic premises about the world; the mystery is that they don’t struggle more often. But what in the world would possess Christians to get tripped up like that?