Sex is not Spiritual

Christianity has shaped Western civilization. In light of that history, the title of this article may seem strange indeed. Christianity affirms the Incarnation, that in Jesus Christ, God actually took on human flesh, and Christianity insists that salvation occurs in and through Christ’s bodily life, suffering, and death.
Christians find spiritual nourishment by sharing the Eucharist, Holy Communion, the body and blood of Christ. Following Jesus, Christians look forward to the resurrection of the body: Heaven is not just a spiritual state but a bodily one, as well. Nonetheless, from Christianity’s earliest beginnings, in most Christian thinking, the body and the spirit have been seen as separate entities.
In Genesis, God created the Spirit before forming the body, the last entity created was the soul which was formed when God breathed into man, the breath of life John 3:6 "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Jesus affirmed this clearly, Jesus himself was not born of flesh and those who are born again were no longer born of the flesh but the spirit. The two were clearly separated John 1: 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. The distinction was clear ", Not born of blood", will of flesh and will of man means only one thing, sexual intercourse.
Being Born again, having the Holy Spirit and receiving eternal life are all spiritual things. Sexual intercourse is totally not in the same class as the realities mentioned, why then do Christians insist on peddling the lies that sex is spiritual? By claiming sex is spiritual, they then put a negative lid on it in such a manner that many believers today see sex in a negative light. You can't have it and claim to see God but you can have it and claim that it severed the bind between you and God. Its spiritual connotation is all negative and this has nothing to do with the teachings of the early apostles.
In Galatians 5:17, Paul wrote, “What the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other.” To the Hebrew mind of the Bible, “flesh” stood for all that is weak, passing, creaturely, and perhaps sinful. “Spirit” stood for all that is life-giving, lasting, and of God. So, understood according to the usage of his day, the teaching of Saint Paul was merely that evil and goodness are at odds, that the worldly and the godly are in tension. Obviously! but ripped from its cultural context and misunderstood in terms of our current usage, Paul’s literal words are taken to refer to sex and to pit it—the flesh, the body—against spirituality. Sex-positivity in Christianity’s early beginnings, Infact the sex negativity that has characterized Christianity did not come from Christianity’s Jewish heritage, nor from the teachings of Jesus, nor even from the letters of Paul. Jewish teaching to this day is sex positive. Jewish couples are supposed to have sex on the Sabbath to hallow the day. The Genesis command was to be fruitful and multiply. And without reference to marriage, children, or family, the collection of poems in the Song of Songs is a paean to sexual love and romance. Jesus’ remarks about sex mention only adultery, divorce, and sexual obsession (lusting in the heart). In addition, some argue that, in healing the centurion’s servant, Jesus restored a threatened homosexual relationship. This argument is based on the affectionate way in which this centurion spoke about this servant and the predominant culture of the Roman Empire in regard to homosexual relationships at the time Saint Paul does not deserve the bad rap he gets about sex. The intent of Romans 1 was not to condemn or support homosexuality. Rather, this text opposes the splintering of the Christian community over irrelevant differences in Jewish purity laws—including the “abomination,” that is, the ritual taboo, of male-male penetrative sex. The early church had many Jewish converts who brought Jewish customs into Christianity and as a result saw non-Jews as unholy. The non-Jews have their own cultures and traditions which were abominable to Jews but which the early church must come to terms with if they truly want to win souls and teach the world a new way in Christ. A missionary who insists on doing things only according to the culture in which he was raised will win no souls. When Peter got to the house of Cornelius he didn't enter the house for this same reason, the Holy Spirit said what he has called clean we should not call unclean. Those who have received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour and those who will yet receive him are clean. The word of God cleanses us and keeps us from all forms of unrighteousness. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul did discourage marriage but only because he believed the world would soon end; and flexible in his counsel, he is still open to the variety of sexual practices of his day. In Galatians 3:28 Paul dismisses even the difference between male and female because “all of you are one in Christ.” Paul was no misogynist. The command in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 that women be silent and subordinate is not from Paul himself but was added by his more conservative disciples such as those who also wrote 1 Timothy 2:11–15 in Paul’s name. The final chapter of the genuinely Pauline letter to the Romans, for example, mentions by name twenty-nine disciples; among these are ten women, three of whom—Phoebe, Prisca, and Junia—held positions of honor and authority in the early Pauline churches. In its beginnings, Christianity was not sex negative. The negativity of the Christian tradition derived from Stoicism and Neo-Platonism, secular philosophies that were prevalent during Christianity’s formation. These systems of thought were suspect of pleasure and were overly rationalistic. Shortsighted in their appreciation of human sexuality, they focused on biological function and argued that sex was for begetting children and any other use was mistaken. This “mistake” was quickly turned into sin, and into the twenty-first century we all live with the result: uneasiness and guilt over sex. The most brilliant minds of the Christian tradition rationalized that misunderstanding. Saint Augustine is the theological favorite of Protestantism, and Saint Thomas Aquinas is the great theologian of Catholicism. Both understood rationality to be the crowning glory of humanity, and both were wary of sex. At the point of orgasm, they reasoned, one momentarily loses rationality, and the risk of such loss can only be justified for a serious reason. The desire to conceive a child would be the only sufficient reason. Christian sex negativity through the twenty-first-century wariness about sex through those early centuries is understandable. Before modern medicine, perhaps a quarter of all women eventually died in childbirth. No effective contraceptive was available. Children born out of wedlock were social pariahs. A non-virgin woman would be hard-pressed to ever find a husband and needed economic support. Sexually transmitted diseases had no cure. Sexual urges were thought to reduce people to the level of an animal. On many fronts, sex was thought to be, and in fact was, dangerous. But why has religion remained rabidly sex-negative even today? Repeated studies show that the more religious people are, the more opposed to sex they tend to be. A nearly hysterical religious opposition to sex—for example, the enlistment of hundreds of millions of American tax dollars to promote sexual abstinence nationally and globally—makes one wonder what is really going on. There is no easy accounting for this religious curiosity. To explain social attitudes is difficult in the best of cases and, perhaps, impossible in a time of rapid change, like our own. Yale historian John Boswell argued that Christianity has basically followed secular mores regarding sexual matters. Far from setting the pace, Christianity tended merely to give it spiritual approval.
-GSW-