NOT IN THE LESSON PLAN

Sometimes, I confess, when I am teaching, I "get off" on a substantial tangent.  Usually the tangent is related to the lesson in some way, and often the rabbit trail is actually a worthwhile one.  But it still represents something that I didn't originally plan to talk about.

 

A case in point was the time when I found myself saying, "God's will is for us to have holistic sex!"

 

How did I get there?!?!?

 

I keep trying, again and again, to get my students to reject the Western dichotomization between body and spirit.  God has designed as whole people, He values us as whole people (hence the incarnation), He loves us as whole people, He redeems us as whole people (hence the resurrection), He wants us to obey as whole people, and He wants us to love others as whole people.  This is what I mean when I talk about being "holistic."

 

One way I encourage my students to think about this is through a set of rather silly questions.  First, I ask them how many of them know any corpses that they consider friends.  I have never had a student respond in the affirmative; I only get rather strange and puzzled looks.  I then ask them how many of them have friends who are ghosts.  Again, only strange looks, no affirmative answers.  A corpse is a body without a spirit, and a ghost is a spirit without a body - neither of which make for very good companions!  The only people we know and interact with are embodied spirits, or spirit-animated bodies.  In other words, we only know and love and communicate with and care for WHOLE PEOPLE - just the way that God designed us to be.

 

This line of thinking is what led me to my rather bizarre comment above.  I pointed out to the students that one of the major problems with pornography and prostitution (even fully consensual prostitution) is that they take a whole person and reduce her (or him) to something purely physical - merely a body as an object of sexual satisfaction and pleasure.  God's design for sex is to create a deep and intimate connection between two people - as WHOLE PEOPLE. Not just two bodies, but two whole body-and-soul people.  God's will is for us to have holistic sex.  That's one reason why it's so important to protect sexuality with the covenant of marriage - to ensure that the sexual relationship is not purely physical, but a whole-person union of heart and soul and mind, as well.

 

Satisfying our sexual desires by reducing people - male or female - to purely physical beings is ALWAYS degrading to their humanity, because God designed us as whole beings, body and soul, and His intention for our sexuality is every bit as holistic as we are.