Embracing the Erotic: The Church’s Unfinished Sexual Revolution

James B. Nelson

[The following text is an excerpt from a series of lectures offered by Dr. Nelson for the Foundation for Contemporary Theology in Houston, Texas.]

A fellow from my hometown, Lake Wobegone, Minnesota, tells wonderful stories. One of Garrison’s tales concerns the lone cowboy riding across the range, that beautiful open country out where (as the old song says) the deer and the antelope play. The cowboy approaches a herd of buffalo, dismounts, walks up to one of the animals, looks it over, and says: “Yuk! Just look at you. Look at that matted hair, those bloodshot eyes, that foul breath. Yuk!” Then the cowboy mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset. The buffalo thinks for a moment, then turns to another buffalo and says, “You know, we seldom hear that kind of thing around here. But I think I’ve just heard a discouraging word.” 

Though we have been consciously working on these sexuality issues in our churches for at least three decades now, we still hear discouraging words. As in the political scene, so also in the religious; when sexual issues arise, too often the anxieties and strident voices rise as well. Still fearful of the divisiveness of such matters in a time of membership attrition, any religious bodies have been virtually paralyzed about sexuality.

Thankfully, there is a brighter side to the picture. Prodded by feminist prophets, spurred by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender prophets, churches have at least begun to challenge the sexism, the heterosexism, and the homophobia by which some have tried to control the lives and bodies of all those who seem different from them. We have cracked open the doors on the hidden scandals of sexual abuse. We have begun to question the notions of gender complementarity, of dominant/submissive patterns of sexuality, of penis-in-vagina intercourse as the only good and true sexual act, of the belief that we can measure the morality of sexual acts by their external form instead of by their relational quality, of the belief that we can reduce all sexual ethics to an ethics of marriage, and, yes, we have begun to question the exclusion of eros from the spiritual life.

These have been our beginnings. But with each passing year the sexuality issues seem to become more complex. The global HIV-AIDS pandemic rolls on; gays and lesbians still suffer from vicious hate crimes; clergy are brought to ecclesiastical trials for performing same-sex unions; protection of children from ubiquitous pornography and protection of free speech remain an unresolved tension; sexual abuse on an unimagined scale rocks portions of the Church; abortion is increasingly restricted and abortion providers become targets of violence; transsexual and intersexual medical developments raise new questions about gender; same-sex unions, adoptions, and benefits for domestic partners are divisive political issues. The list goes on and on. Is there any doubt that our sexual agenda is confusing, unsettled, unfinished?

Even when we in the churches have not handled sexuality well, perhaps we have learned this: if it can generate such emotional intensity and symbolic weight, our sexuality must be important, indeed. But how important?

It is a good question, but too narrow. Sex is not the same as sexuality. “Genitality” (to use the academic word) or “having sex” (in common parlance) is only part of sexuality — an important part for many of us, but a relatively small part.

Sexuality may or may not involve genital expression. Celibate people are still sexual. Sexuality has to do with our capacity for procreation and parenting, to be sure. But it is much more. Our sexuality embraces our embodied ways of being in the world as female and male, our differing gender meanings, our varied orientations, our deep desires for sensuous touch with the world, our hungers for physical and emotional intimacy. Genitally active or celibate, single or paired, young or old, living with disability or temporarily able-bodied, by the goodness of God we are all sexual beings from birth to death.

The word sexuality has a Latin root, the verb secare, meaning to cut off, to sever, to disconnect from the whole. Likewise, our experience as sexual creatures has at its core a powerful energy and an aching longing to connect.

Looking with eyes of faith, I believe human sexuality is God’s way of calling us out of separation and loneliness into communication and communion. Indeed, this sexuality that has such power in our lives—the source of such anxiety, such joy, such yearning, such shame, such curiosity—must be very close to the center of things.

And what is eros? Though culture often seems to say so, the erotic is not pornographic, X-rated, exploitive sex. Nor is eros simply lust, for lust is egoistic obsession with what we want to possess for our own gratification. Further, though deeply connected to our sexuality, eros is not simply genital urges and feelings.

It is, Paul Tillich rightly saw, the moving power of life, the hunger for connection, the passion for reunion. Eros is that dimension of our love born of desire. It is our yearning for fulfillment. Sensual, bodily, juicy in its energy, eros is open to feeling and passion. It seeks the integration of body and spirit, of human and divine. It is love that is constantly searching for reunion.

So, as St. Augustine taught us (in one of his good moments, and he did have a lot of those), the problem is not to uproot or transcend desire — for desire is an essential mark of our humanity and of our belonging to God. Rather, the problem is to order all objects of our desire in accord with their true relation to God, in whom alone our restless hearts will find satisfaction and fulfillment.

But as with sexuality itself, so also with the erotic love that is at its center, eros, theologians typically have had a tough time. In the 1930s, Swedish theologian and bishop Anders Nygren wrote an enormously influential book, Agape and Eros, which—unfortunately—powerfully influenced much theology ever since. Nygren set the two loves in radical opposition to each other, and eros got the worst of it. Characterized (or rather caricatured) as egocentric, narcissistic, and self-seeking, eros was depicted as that love which was to be defeated by self-giving, sacrificial agape.

But enormous theological and practical problems come with the denigration of eros.The integration of sexuality and spirituality becomes forever problematic, for, in spite of an incarnationalist faith, the body remains theologically suspect and hence so does passion.

Furthermore, self-love continues to be confused with egoistic narcissism, and self-effacing behavior is baptized (especially for the sexually marginalized). Those persons who appear to symbolize the body most fully—women, gay men and lesbians, trans-gendered persons, persons of color—are especially stigmatized by the rejection of the erotic.

Still further, the denial of the erotic is closely linked to the confused state of sexual pleasure in the Christian life. Sexual pleasure is believed to be either inherently dangerous (as St. Augustine taught) or justified only as a means to a higher end — procreation (as St. Thomas believed). In either case, sexual pleasure is darkly suspect.

But in the end, any spirituality that lacks erotic energy becomes lifeless and cold. The pervasive fear of sex and passion, so common in our churches, is certainly linked with the difficulty many Christians have in sustaining a passion for justice.1

For glimpses of a better erotic future for the Church, let us turn to a familiar story that many in the Christian community tell about God—the mystery of Christmas, Lent, and Easter—the Christic drama in three acts: incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. 

Incarnation

That stunning prologue to the Fourth Gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word…” The Word —God’s own creative meaning and energy. And when the Word came to dwell with us, it became —what? A book? A creed? A theological system? A code of morality? No. To the everlasting embarrassment of all dualistic piety, it became flesh — full of grace and truth. Warm-blooded sexual flesh. And it still does. When we meet God in and through our sensuous, urinating, defecating, menstruating, lubricating, orgasmic, ejaculating, youthful, aging, frail, vigorous, hungry, and vulnerable human flesh, there is incarnation.

The opening words of John’s gospel doubtless shocked its first readers, steeped in the belief that flesh was the root cause of the world’s impurity. And now the gospel writer is telling them that God was alive in a radically revealing way in this fleshly, fully human life of an ex-carpenter-turned-itinerant rabbi. It was a startling claim. And it still is. For our sexual disease breeds a bodily distrust that brings out the docetist in us and makes the incarnation into doctrine but not flesh. You may recall how Søren Kierkegaard, after courting Regina for years and finally winning her promise to marry him, suddenly jilted her. His explanation? He had come to realize that his love for her would distract him from a “higher” love for God. It took a later and more incarnationalist theologian (Jewish in faith), Martin Buber, to say of the Dane’s decision, “That is sublimely to misunderstand God. Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.” We are destined to come to God through our earthly loves, not in spite of them.2

Dealing with incarnation, most Christian theologians (like Kierkegaard) have tastefully or fearfully ignored Jesus’ sexuality — and hence ours. So let another good Jewish thinker startle us. This one is not a professional theologian but an art historian, Leo Steinberg. His lavishly illustrated book has an unusual title: The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion.3

Steinberg’s point? For a thousand years of Christian art, Jesus’ sexuality was disregarded. Paintings and sculpture attempted to portray only his divinity. Then came the Renaissance. Now devout Christian artists from Flanders to Florence removed the drapery from Jesus’ figure and purposely exposed his genitals, even drawing attention to them. What happened in this Renaissance art has been tactfully overlooked for the past five hundred years — that is the “modern oblivion.”

These were devout Renaissance artists, neither trying to shock nor to blaspheme. They were trying to make theological statements. For one, they were saying that Jesus’ chastity was real and valid. Sexual abstinence without vigorous sexual capacity is an empty lesson. Beyond that, the shamelessness of exposing Jesus’ genitals points back to our original innocence (as in Eden, naked and without shame) and points forward to our redemption from sin and sexual shame. Most fundamentally, the focus on the bodily sexuality of Jesus demonstrates the thoroughness and completeness of the incarnation: God’s revelation of sacred presence in and through our bodily life. And that is good gospel news. The issue here is not Jesus’ maleness. It is the fullness of his humanity, including his fully sexual humanity.

Incarnation. The goodness of God-revealing flesh. And how critical it is to name it so Baby Suggs knew that. You may remember Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, and Baby Suggs, the grandmother and holy woman of that nineteenth-century black family who had escaped from slavery. As she drew her people around her in the clearing in the woods each Saturday afternoon, she “told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it … You got to love it. You… . This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.’”
 
And there is Alice Walker’s character in The Color Purple saying, “God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff that God did.” Put into the more traditional words of the prayer book: “It was God’s good pleasure to take on our human flesh.” Incarnation happened. It still does.
 
Crucifixion
 

But we still live with erotic alienation and brokenness. So, God’s story moves to redemption. In the Christic drama it is the cross, dealing with human sin.

Now, I spent much of my life in Minnesota where folks still know about sin. After all, in Minnesota there are more Lutherans than people, so not surprisingly we call it “the guilt state.” Some time ago I heard a Minneapolis standup comic, a woman in her mid-seventies, describe her experience. “Oh, I’m so Lutheran,” she said, “I just can’t get away from it. Recently, I went to renew my driver’s license. As I stood in line waiting for my turn with the clerk, I got more and more nervous. Finally, I got to the counter, and when the clerk asked me, ‘Where were you born?’ I blurted out, ‘I was born in sin, and in iniquity did my parents conceive me.’ I’m just so Lutheran.” 

Yes, we are all sinners. But our sexuality as such is not sinful. In that dimension of life, it is our alienation from the erotic wholeness for which we were created and destined that is sinful.

But we’ve had a long religious history that has named sexual sin differently. The early Church began to name specific sexual transgressions as the premier forms of human wrongdoing, and sexuality per se became the root of human evil. I think of the early Church Fathers who saw sexual intercourse as inherently flawed because it transmitted original sin, and who called women “the gate of hell” because they saw women as essentially bodily and sexual. I think of the Church Fathers who counseled the faithful to wait until they were at least sixty before reading the Song of Solomon so that it would not inflame the passions.

Nevertheless, decent theology has always known that sin is not basically an act (something we do), it is fundamentally a condition (a condition of alienation, estrangement). It is out of that prior state of alienation that destructive acts arise. That is true of our sexuality. Sexual sin lies fundamentally in our estrangement from our bodies, our alienation from our intended erotic wholeness. And the terrible historic irony is that so many religious teachings about sexuality actually have increased our bodily alienation and hence deepened our sexual sin.

Can the cross help us? Ah, but there’s the rub. Some atonement interpretations have contributed mightily to our sexual sickness. The notion that pain is inherently redemptive, the idea that salvation must come through the self-sacrifice of the innocent — such images of the cross have been the primary force for some women in shaping their acceptance of abuse. Those interpretations have eroticized domination and, regardless of their intent, have silenced too many women and children and gay men in midst of violence against them.

No! Instead, let us say that being formed into the Crucified One means standing with those who are being unjustly killed in body and spirit, standing with them for life. Let us always be clear: Jesus was killed not because he chose death but precisely because he chose life and in so doing he threatened those who were obsessed with the ways of pain and death, domination and submission.

Yet, the cross does speak, and genuinely so, of redemptive suffering. It is the powerful vulnerability of the sacred presence still entering the depths of our human pain—a divine presence we can know in our own authentic vulnerability. 

The cross is about something like that. It is all about God’s agapaic entering into our human pain. It is all about God’s erotic yearning for reunion with us. It is all about God’s redefinition of power, giving us back our bodies and our senses, yes, giving us back our lives.

Resurrection

So, the Christic story has moved to resurrection. The ancient affirmations are familiar: Christ is alive! I believe in the resurrection of the body.

Instead of seeing salvation as anti-sexual and disembodied, we are beginning to understand that whatever salvation is, it importantly involves our erotic healing — a resurrection of the body.

We hunger and thirst for that reunion. We long to put aside the remnants of a disembodied notion of salvation. We hunger to experience grace as deep and profound acceptance of our whole bodyselves. Can it happen?

The resurrection of the body takes many forms, and, as Baby Suggs said, its all about flesh, flesh that needs to be loved. Furthermore, as she said, the only grace we can have is the grace we can imagine — and name and claim. So how can we name the grace of body salvation?

We can name the goodness of bodily self-love. Though some of our religious heritage would have it otherwise, authentic self-love is not egocentrism, grasping selfishness, or narcissism — all conditions which arise from the lack of authentic self-love. Both Hebrew and Christian scriptures bid us to love our neighbors as ourselves, not instead of ourselves.

One sexual example: what about sexual self-love expressed in masturbation? Even though the nineteenth-century medical fears of consumption, blindness, and insanity are no longer with us, within our own memory a surgeon general could be dismissed for simply mentioning the subject favorably in public. But, when self-pleasuring is neither obsessive nor escapist, when it is the celebration of the gift and goodness of our own flesh, we might know yet another experience of grace. And that can be sexual healing.

It is the gift of bodily revelation that can put us in touch with an underdeveloped part of our spirituality — a path historically called the Via Negativa. It is not the Via Positiva way of climbing to the transcendent heights, but rather sinking vulnerably into the sacred depths. Not the way of fullness, but of emptiness. Not the way of striving and doing, but of letting go and just being, and knowing that I am accepted. It leads to a different kind of power, a strength found in vulnerability. Again, body healing, body resurrection.

Indeed, the resurrection of our bodies can connect us with creation in ways that might help this fragile planet to survive. A philosopher once said, “Be careful how you name the world. It is that way.” Well, what is our fundamental description of the world?

The minister of my boyhood Presbyterian church had one predictable sentence he repeated in every sermon. I used to wait for it, and he never failed me.Hewassofondofitthatheroseuponhistoes each time he pronounced it. “This is,” he would say, “a godless, sin-sick weary world, a vale of tears.” Though he could point to plenty of evidence, and so can we, is this a resurrection description? Death names the world godless. Resurrection names the world as God’s body.

Resurrection of the body. A rich symbol of many meanings, and surely it means more than individual survival. The apostle writes: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves…groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22–23). Could there be, just could there be a connection between the redemption of our bodies and that of creation?

What if our bodies are revelations — not of disconnection but fundamentally of our deep connectedness to everything else? After all, each of us is composed of trillions of individual cells, all trying to live in harmony with one another. Our bodies are communities with the whole earth. Our bodily fluids carry the chemicals of the primeval seas, our bones have the same carbon as the ancient mountains, our blood contains the sugar that once flowed in the sap of now fossilized trees, the nitrogen binding our bones is the same that binds nitrates to the soil. Even in — often precisely in the midst of — our diseases and bodily dysfunctions, our flesh reveals our destiny for wholeness and connection with all of creation.4

When we know that, we have also known in some way the resurrection of the body. And that’s pretty erotic stuff — bodies are, you know. As e.e. cummings has written: 

i thank you God for most this amazing day…(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday, this is the birth of life and of love and wings…)…how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any…human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)….. 

That is the rebirth of eros: the resurrection of the body.


Notes
1. See Marvin Ellison, “Common Decency: A New Christian Sexual Ethics,” Christianity and Crisis, Nov. 12, 1990, 356.
2. Cf. Robert McAfee Brown, Spirituality and Liberation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988), 77f.
3. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
4. See Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Green Paradise Lost (Wellesley, Mass.: Roundtable Press, 1979, 1981), 58ff.

Following Macalester College and military service, James Nelson came to Yale for a B.D. and then a Ph.D. in Christian ethics. After ministries in Congregational (now UCC) parishes in West Haven, Connecticut and Vermillion, South Dakota, he joined the faculty of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, where he taught ethics for thirty-two years. Jim and his spouse, Wilys Claire Nelson (a retired hospital chaplain), live in Tucson, Arizona, with adult children on both coasts. He is the author of thirteen books, most recently Thirst: God and the Alcoholic Experience (Westminster John Knox, 2004), Moral Nexus: Ethics of Christian Identity and Community, revised, 25th Anniversary Edition (Westminster John Knox, 1996), and Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, edited with Sandra Longfellow (Westminster John Knox, 1994).