Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [64]
A modern Protestant version of this error includes one female author speaking against marital sex purely for pleasure and even orgasm, calling it “sexual gluttony.” She said, “Nowhere does the Bible say that the purpose of marital sex is climax, much much [sic] less climax at the expense of fruitfulness and oneness.”23
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The belief that sex is gross has even affected how the most erotic, passionate, and sexual book of the Bible has been interpreted and misinterpreted. Until around AD 100, the Jewish rabbis interpreted the Song of Songs in a literal way as a series of love songs between a husband and a wife, using figurative language. The Song of Songs was read at the Passover liturgy, and the songs were often sung in the pubs to celebrate marital love and intimacy within a covenant relationship.
But early in the history of the Christian church, as allegorical methods of Bible interpretation became fashionable, the Song of Songs was explained as being about our relationship with God instead of being a passionate poem about a husband-and-wife relationship. In studying love and intimacy, you will find that some principles may indeed correspond to our relationship with God, though this is not the primary intention of the Song. Those who consider, to varying degrees, sex as gross drive this misuse of Scripture. And rather than renewing their minds to agree with the Bible, they instead change the meaning of the Bible to fit their own error, as they simply cannot fathom that God would speak in detail positively about sexual pleasure.
In our experience, one common source of the sex-as-gross view is religious and sexually prudish older women who, in the name of mentoring, teach younger women that sex is for husbands and babies but not for personal pleasure. Subsequently, they instruct other women to endure sex as part of marital duty but not for marital delight. Perhaps the most extreme examples I (Mark) have encountered were multiple young couples from strict religious upbringings at a conference in Minnesota. In conversations throughout the course of the day, I repeatedly had Christian couples who had been married a year or more asking when I thought they should consummate their relationship and have sex for the first time. They had no sexual contact of any kind before marriage, or even after marriage, because they considered it gross and were actually somewhat scared of sex. Most wrongly thought that sex was for procreation alone and not pleasure.
If sex is only for procreation, it would mean that apart from the fertile days a woman experiences each month, sexual intercourse in marriage would be sinful. Furthermore, this would mean that intercourse with an unfertile husband or wife or sex with a postmenopausal wife would also be sinful. All of this is incredibly nonsensical, unbiblical, and impractical for many reasons. A woman’s clitoris is a nerve center created by God for only one purpose—pleasure, not reproduction. God also made women multi-orgasmic for the joy of sexual pleasure in marriage. Proverbs 5:19 reveals that a wife’s breasts are not solely for baby food but also for husband fun: “Let her breasts satisfy you at all times.”
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What is also curious is the frequent hypocrisy of those who most vocally purport the sex-as-gross position. Such people speak with great passion about the evils of sex. Perhaps the most obvious are the hypocritical preachers who preach against sexual sins that they themselves are guilty of concurrently committing. To be fair and compassionate, sometimes the sex-is-gross position is also the result of sexual sin and abuse. Those who have sinned and been sinned against sexually and have not worked through their issues biblically and thoroughly often see sex as