The Morality of Sex

In this series, we have been thinking afresh about Christian attitudes to sex. In the first article, I explored the reasons why some Christians may put a disproportionate emphasis on sexual matters. Then in the second article, I sought to present a more balanced view of sex. Both these articles have intentionally avoided the morality of sex and how we judge whether certain acts are right or wrong. Now, in this third article, I want to think about the underpinnings of a Christian morality of sex.

Attitudes To Sex Today

In the 1960s, there was a “sexual revolution” in the West, which saw a dramatic change in attitudes to sex. Many in wider society saw this as a liberation, giving individuals far greater freedom and autonomy. It also changed how society viewed sex, leading to changes were predicated on the view that the key moral values are (1) avoiding harm to others and (2) respecting personal autonomy, which, in the area of sexual ethics, is generally condensed to the principle of consent. And, today, the overarching principle in society governing sexual relationships is that whatever consenting adults do is fine. However, consent is not a sufficient principle. Something more is needed.

That said, we should not minimise the importance of consent. Indeed, understood correctly, consent has its origins in the Christian worldview. You wouldn’t respect the consent of someone unless you also recognised their moral status. In the Roman world, consent was not seen as important or necessary. The rich and powerful had sex with whoever they wanted, especially slaves who, of course, had no say.

Christianity changed this ethos. All are one in Christ, regardless of race, or sex, or status. And Paul clearly had an uphill challenge with new converts, helping them to adjust their societal expectations around sex. He writes,

… since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. (1 Cor 7:2)

The clear implication is that this was not a common practice. Even within marriage, Paul has to introduce the concept of mutual consent, here for periods of abstinence but also, by implication for the opposite. We should not mistake Paul’s meaning when he says, the wife does not have authority over her own body¹ – he does not mean consent is not required since the principle applies to both parties. Paul means that they have a responsibility to each other. This is one of the shortcomings of relying only on consent. One might extract consent from someone without showing responsibility to that person and their needs or wishes. The radical idea that Christianity unleashed on the Roman world was that all humans were created in the image of God, including women and slaves.

It is unfortunate, then, that secular society today often focuses on consent to the exclusion of other moral principles. Consent is incredibly important, but emphasising just this one principle has some unfortunate consequences.

Firstly, if the only relevant moral value is consent, then sex has no special value in-and-of-itself. It would be no more special than sharing a cup of tea or a game of tennis. Yet most people recognise that sex does have a special value. One of the reasons that sexual assault is taken so seriously is because we hold the belief that sex is more special than other acts. We wouldn't see non-consensual tennis in the same way.

Secondly, consent is quite thin soup when it comes to something as highly charged as sex. You can consent something that you don’t want, or that you later regret, or that isn’t in your best interests. Social or peer expectations can motivate someone to give consent contrary to their own preferences or ideals. Consent puts the full responsibility on the individual to protect their own wellbeing and their own wishes.

Thirdly, focusing on consent alone erodes the significance of other moral virtues. An alarming number of women die each year during sex involving strangulation. In most cases the man is not prosecuted because he can assert that the act was consensual (and how could the criminal justice system prove otherwise?) Yet even if we assume that full and willing consent was given, there seems something deeply troubling about the idea that someone should take sexual pleasure from simulating violence on their partner. Taking pleasure in violence is not a virtue – it is the opposite. Limiting the principles of sexual morals to consent, ignores the central basis of morality: the inner person, the conscience, the heart.

Today’s secular morality of sex seems insufficient to express that value that many of us feel that it has. Instead, we should look to a Christian morality of sex.

The Bible

Naturally we start by considering the Bible. However, we quickly discover it is a complicated place to go for moral guidance about sex. Particularly in the Old Testament, many of the characters exhibit behaviours that would shock modern Christian sensibilities. Abraham married his half-sister.² Many of the major characters had multiple wives, including Abraham (Sarah and Keturah), Moses (Zipporah and a Cushite woman), and David (Michal, Ahinoam, Abigail, Maachah, Haggith, Abital, Eglah, and Bathsheba). In addition to multiple wives, Old Testament characters seemed to think nothing of also having concubines – that is, women who did not have the status of wife but nevertheless that men slept with – including Abraham, Gideon and David. This is not to mention the 700 wives and 300 concubines of Solomon.³ The way that Sarah gives Hagai to Abraham to sleep with, and that Leah and Rachael give Bilhah and Zilpah to Jacob, is indicative of the lack of control female slaves had over their own bodies. Samson “went in” to a prostitute. Judah slept with Tamar, thinking she was a prostitute, and seemingly was so unembarrassed about that transaction that he sent his servant back later to settle up. Indeed, Tamar is described by Judah as “more righteous”, despite the circumstances, because the governing moral principle of this story was not prostitution, but that a widow should marry her dead husband’s brother.⁴

We have to acknowledge that these stories are not recorded in the Bible as examples for us to follow. Unlike the parables of Jesus, these stories do not conclude with the injunction to go and do likewise.

The Law of Moses also doesn’t seem well suited as a guide of a Christian morality of sex. It does prohibit some of these behaviours (such as incest), but is more open on other behaviours. Polygamy was not forbidden but it was regulated, securing the rights of the first wife to food, clothing, and “marital rights”, and securing the rights of sons from both wives. Divorce, also, was not restricted but regulated. Both men and women were forbidden to become shrine prostitutes, and “normal” prostitutes are detested.⁵

There are also no regulations in the Law of Moses about weddings or marriage. Women have little autonomy. Daughters are given in marriage by their fathers in return for the bride price. There is some measure of protection from those laws that forbid a man to divorce his wife on false accusations. Yet, an unmarried woman who is raped is forced to marry her rapist. Female slaves are not afforded the same protections as free woman. Women enslaved from other nations have the lowest status of all; if an Israelite wants to take such a slave as a wife, he can.⁶

The Law of Moses regulates a lot of the excesses of this period, forbidding many of the sexual practices of the surrounding nations, but falls short of a Christian view of marriage. In relation to divorce, Jesus said that,

Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard, (Matt 19:8)

implying that such permission was a concession rather than an ideal. Perhaps we should regard other commandments of the Law of Moses in this same way, as concessions to that cultural context rather than God’s true intent. So we cannot base a Christian morality of sex on either the stories or the commandments in the Old Testament. Maybe the New Testament is a better set of commandments that nullify and supersede those of the Old? But it would be a mistake to think that way. That is not the way that the scriptures function for the Christian, nor the way that Christian morality is founded.

Whilst the Bible is sometimes as presented by Christians a guidebook for life, the truth is that it does not operate in that way. You cannot simply turn up the section on sex and get a complete and robust sexual ethic. The Bible isn’t that sort of book. The Bible is collection of books telling the story of God’s relationship with the nation of Israel, building to his revelation in Jesus Christ. These histories are not intended as patterns to live by, nor are the commandments intended to be definitive answers to complex moral problems. In fact, I think it is really important that the Bible does not give predefined answers to every moral question, because I think God desires something richer and more significant for his children: to understand what he truly values.

Ethical Theories

In the study of Ethics, or Moral Philosophy, the different approaches to morality are usually split into three categories: (1) Consequentialism, (2) Deontology, and (3) Virtue Ethics. These categories are defined by the key concept that these different approaches take to determining what is right and what is wrong. Consequentialism assesses moral actions with regards their consequences, Deonotology focuses on rules and duties, and Virtue Ethics focuses on the virtues through which those actions are undertaken. Let’s consider these in turn.

Everyone will intuitively want to give some thought to consequences in relation to their actions. In general, we might expect good actions to have better consequences that bad ones. But determining right and wrong purely with regard consequences leads to results that run counter to our moral intuitions. The most common form of Consequentialism is Utilitarianism, whose maxim is “the greatest good for the greatest number”. However, such an approach risks treating individuals as means to an end and may run counter to the best interests of minorities in pursuit of better consequences for the majority. Our moral intuitions (or perhaps, our engrained Christian values) posit that all human beings have innate moral dignity and worth; these intuitions would run counter to the Utilitarian approach. We do not find the Bible framing moral decisions through a Consequentialist lens.

In contrast to Consequentialism, Deontology might prevent people being treated as a means to an end because it assesses moral actions through rules and duties that would apply universally. On the other hand, attempting to define rules, principles, and duties that apply in every case, and yet are flexible enough to adapt to the nuances of every case, is complicated. For example, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative – that you should behave in such a way that you could wish your actions become a universal law – seems to run into many counter-examples of actions that seem benign and yet that I can’t wish to be a universal law. For example, I don’t want everyone to go to the same restaurant on the same evening as me. One form of Deontology is Divine Command Theory, the view that the origin of moral duties is divine commands. Given that the Bible contains a lot of commandments, we might understand the appeal in Divine Command Theory. And yet, it is also obvious that the rules in the Bible are not a straightforward set of universally applicable and unchanging divine commands. There are many rules in the Bible that Christians simply do not follow. For example, immediately after the commandment to Love your neighbour as yourself, we find the commandment to not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material⁷ – a commandment I am breaking as I write. Furthermore, it is not obvious that the rules in the Bible form an exhaustive moral programme, since there are a lot of topics not specifically addressed.

I think when we look at the teaching of Jesus, he seems to steer toward Virtue Ethics.

The Teaching of Jesus

Jesus is very critical of the rules-based approach of the Pharisees, the religious leaders of his own day. In Matthew, Jesus gives a long list of criticisms of the Pharisees and their approach. He says,

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matt 23:23)

The Pharisees were so intent on keeping every rule exactly, that they would even measure our a tenth of their herbs and spices to donate to the temple to make sure they were keeping to the rule, and yet Jesus says they were neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Keeping to the strict letter of the law had blinded the Pharisees from what was really important, virtues like mercy and faithfulness.

Jesus makes the same point elsewhere. There is an incident where the Pharisees criticise Jesus because he allows his disciples to eat without first washing, breaking one of their rules. In response Jesus quotes these words from Isaiah to them:

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules. (Matt 15:8-9, quoting Is 29:13)

For Jesus, the important point was not whether you kept the rules or not; the important thing was where your heart is. The hearts of the Pharisees were far from God. Later in the same chapter he says:

Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts – murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.” (Matt 15:17-20)

It is important to see the contrast here between a rules-based approach and the teaching of Jesus. In the Law of Moses, there is page after page of rules about what you can and can’t eat; rules upon rules about foods that make you unclean, foods that defile. Yet here Jesus says that whatever you eat, just goes into your stomach and then out again; it has no moral effect on you; you are not defiled by the foods you eat. Jesus says the bad things come from your own heart – it is evil thoughts in the heart that are the source of the problem.

Again and again in the teaching of Jesus, we find him referring to the heart as the source of moral action, as the source of right and wrong. Think about these words of Jesus:

No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. (Luke 6:43-45)

His point is that good actions and evil actions all come from the heart. If your heart is full of good, then that will result in good actions, but if your heart is full of evil, then it will result in evil actions. Of course, for most of us, our hearts are a mix of both. This is why careful examination of our motives is so important when making complex moral decisions. The teaching of Jesus, then, is about the intentions of the heart, it is about virtues.

Sabbath

The difference in Jesus’ approach to right and wrong is probably seen mostly clearly in his approach to the Sabbath. The Law of Moses had very clear rules about the Sabbath:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work (Exod 20:8-10)

In fact, this rule was so important, there were very strict punishments for those who broke it. But Jesus has a different approach. In Matthew, we read about how the disciples were walking through a field on the Sabbath and plucked some grain to eat. The Pharisees complain to Jesus about this because they considered it to be work, which would be breaking the commandments about the Sabbath. Jesus responds quoting words from Hosea, saying

If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. (Matt 12:7)

This response is so telling because the disciples had broken the letter of the law; the disciples had worked on the Sabbath. But Jesus prioritises virtues like mercy over keeping the rules. He declares the disciples to be “innocent”, despite their breach of the commandment, because their act had no evil intent.

Again, in Mark, we read how Jesus was teaching in a synagogue when a man with a disabled hand came in. The account says some were closely watching Jesus to see whether he would heal the man, because that would be work and would be breaking the Sabbath. For Jesus, these onlookers had completely the wrong priorities. He says to the crowd,

Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill? (Mark 3:4)

The implication of Jesus’ question is that the right thing to do is to do good, and hence Jesus heals the man. Jesus’ question illustrates the difference between a rules-based approach and a virtue-based approach. The commandment forbade working on the Sabbath. If that commandment is meant to apply in every case, without exception, then healing someone on the Sabbath would be wrong. Yet Jesus says that healing is the right thing to do. Doing good is more important than keeping the rules. Your actions should be guided by the good intentions of your heart, not by the rules.

If this is true then this has a profound effect on how we should think about moral issues, including the morality of sex. Rather than just considering Consequences, or trying to codify Rules to govern our actions, we should be trying to understand what Virtues are important to our heavenly father. Rather than focusing on the interpretation of disputed words. we should be looking to the values taught in scripture. We should be looking to the character of Jesus to shape our hearts into hearts that are ready to do good works.

This is not to say that an approach to morality based around virtues, or the heart to use Jesus’ terminology, will ignore consequences or other ideas. Something must give content to our moral thinking. But what defines an action as good or bad is not whether it has bad consequences, or whether it breaks a rule, but whether it is done from a good motive, from a character that reflects the character of God.

A Good Heart

A virtue is a positive character trait. For Christians, virtues take their pattern from the character of God, particularly as revealed to us in the person of Jesus. Put more simply, for Christians morality is a matter of mirroring the character of Jesus. There are many such Christian virtues, like humility and compassion, that we find modelled for us in the person of Jesus. For our purposes here, I want to sketch out some Christian virtues relevant to the morality of sex.

The first of this is reverence. This respect for God should lead us to honour his intentions and purposes. As we have explored in previous articles, sex is a gift from God, a blessing to be enjoyed with thanksgiving. Furthermore, if as I have proposed, sex was given by God for the purpose of relationship formation, then this tells against the idea of casual sex, or physical intimacy divorced from emotional intimacy.

Then there is respect. A full respect for others as full persons made in the image of God. The radical equality of moral worth implied by this concept is at the heart of the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself and of Jesus’ injunction to do to others as you should have them to do to you. What lies behind these commandments is the recognition of the full humanity of the other. As we saw in a previous article, we are embodied persons. Our bodies are part of who we are. Therefore, to treat someone as just a body is an insult to them and their creator. To treat someone as an object denies their personhood altogether. Respecting their full humanity, to treat someone as you would like to be treated, means thinking about their full well-being: physical and emotional and spiritual. Just because someone might not be physically harmed by sexual intercourse does not mean it is in their interests. And to engage in an act against someone's interests is not moral behaviour.

Lastly, there is faithfulness. This is one of the key characteristics of God, as revealed in the Bible. It is also part of the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus warned against making oaths because Christians should not need oaths to make them truthful.⁸ Faithfulness means keeping the commitments you’ve made and staying true to your word. More than this, faithfulness means a commitment that transcends just those promises articulated in words. Of course, faithfulness in marriage is not just about sexual fidelity – for example, financial fidelity is also important – but Christians’ sexual relationships will be founded on commitment.

There are other virtues too we could explore, but with these three we can begin to see the shape and scope of a Christian morality of sex, which entails that sexual intercourse is only to be enacted in the context of a committed relationship, based upon a mutual respect for the other and for their well-being.

To add one caveat: whilst love is a Christian virtue, being in love is not. We are not well-served in English by having one word, “love”, that has such a wide semantic field, being used of great spectrum of different concepts. Being in love is not bad or wrong. It is natural and involuntary. But it should not be mistaken for the virtue of love, and certainly cannot be taken to inform moral decision making. If anything, the power and intensity of that feeling of being in love risks blinding us to genuine virtues that should be guiding our actions. Christian love should be shown to all people.

How far?

When I was a teenager perhaps the most common question my contemporary Christadelphians would ask is: how far can I go with my girlfriend/boyfriend before marriage? It is an understandable question.

The problem with the question is that it assumes a rules-based approach to Christian morality. The question assumes there is a rule (i.e. no sex before marriage) and is, in effect, requesting an adjudication on whether this rule includes (or excludes) kissing, petting, non-penetrative sex, etc. Now, of course, there is no explicit rule in the scriptures saying “no sex before marriage” – though it is implied – and certainly there are no explicit rules on other pre-marital behaviours. This is because the concept of dating is a modern notion. For many of the characters in the Old Testament, becoming husband and wife seems like it was a fairly instantaneous process; for Isaac, taking Rebekah into his mother’s tent seems to have been enough.⁹ For a first century Jew, they would probably be married as teenagers and their marriage would have been arranged. If a young woman, like Mary, was betrothed, this did not mean she was in a romantic relationship (“dating”) with Joseph; betrothal was as binding as marriage. All that remained was for her to move from her father’s house into the house of her husband. The idea of spending months or years in a romantic relationship before deciding to get married (or not) was just not the practice, so the question of “how far can I go” would not have arisen. Indeed, the question of “falling in love” with someone was basically irrelevant since your spouse was chosen by your parents. But today (in affluent countries at least), many young people will not finish full time education till their early 20s and may not be in a position to afford to rent accommodation of their own until later still. This means that marriage is considerably delayed in comparison to the first century practice. Young Christians might meet their future spouse as teenagers and yet wait many years until marriage, and thus consummation.

The apostle Paul would likely have been pragmatic on this point; he says to the Corinthians: it is better to marry than to burn with passion.¹⁰ We, as community, might reflect on whether we should be encouraging our young people to marry as soon as they are ready, regardless of the norms of wider society or indeed the perceived “necessities” of adult independence. Why should a young couple wait until after university, or until they have a house of their own? Indeed, why should they wait eighteen months to first plan a massive wedding? All those things could come after, as desired, but that need not prevent the actual marriage starting much, much, sooner.

However, this line of thinking is still operating on a rules-based approach, looking for clear, binary, markers that can then be used to denote the sinfulness or otherwise of a particular action. There is a risk that we treat marriage as such a marker, with the implication that ticking off that ceremony is the thing that determines the rightness of sexual intercourse. But the virtues-based approach, which we find in the teaching of Jesus, should guide us to look to our motives behind our actions and the virtues in which they are rooted. The question of whether to have sex, or indeed engage in any erotic behaviours, should be answered by our motives and by our character, even within marriage. Am I simply seeking self-gratification, apart from emotional intimacy and commitment? Or am I motivated by a full reciprocal respect for my partner and their well-being?

I suspect many Christians couples will continue to see marriage as an important moment of transition in their relationships, as they publicly and legally express their commitment to each other. And though conducting marriages was not always part of the function of churches – marriage only became a sacrament of the church in 1164 – there is something valuable in the expression of commitment before God and within the church community. Nevertheless, for the Christian, the operative issue is virtues like commitment and fidelity, and how those find expression for Christian couples may differ across circumstances. This virtues-based approach is not license for self-indulgence, but places greater responsibility on the Christian to act in a way that is consistent with the character modelled for them by their master.

Summary

There is something troublingly deficient about the sexual morality of today’s secular society. Focusing on consent alone as the key moral principle governing sexual relationships fails to do justice to the significance of sex and risks real harms, both emotional and physical. Christianity offers a deeper and richer morality of sex, that requires consideration and respect for the well-being of the other person. The precondition for sexual intercourse is not just consent, but reciprocal desire and reciprocal benefit, expressed through commitment and fidelity. This morality is not based upon rules, in the way that crude caricatures of Christians often portray, but based upon virtues that seek to emulate the character of God, as revealed to us through the person of Jesus. The Bible does not present us with a rule for every moral decision and it is a mistake to try to fit that the Bible into such a framework. Instead, the Bible guides us to forming virtuous characters that inform our moral decision-making, despite the differing circumstances and differing scenarios we find ourselves in. This is true of the changing circumstances and scenarios around sexual behaviours today. We do not have rules to follow suited to every case, but instead it is virtues like reverence for God, respect for others, and faithfulness that guide us in what we should do.

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1. 1Corinthians 7:5, 7:4↩︎

2. Genesis 20:12↩︎

3. Genesis 25:6, Judges 8:31, 2Samuel 5:13, 1Kings 11:3↩︎

4. Genesis 16:3, Genesis 30:4,9, Judges 16:1, Genesis 38, cf. Deut 25:5↩︎

5. Exodus 21:10-11, Deuteronomy 21:15-17, 24:1-4, 23:17, 23:18↩︎

6. Deuteronomy 22:13-19, 22:28-29, Leviticus 19:20-22, Deuteronomy 21:10-11↩︎

7. Leviticus 19:18-19↩︎

8. Galatians 5:22, Matthew 5:33-37↩︎

9. Genesis 24:67; also see Ruth 4:13; 1 Samuel 25:42; 2 Samuel 12:14↩︎

10. 1Corinthians 7:9↩︎