If there’s a scriptural consensus to be gathered, however, it’s that sexual relations should be reserved for a husband and wife. This is perhaps painful for many Americans to hear in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but the Bible is not an especially inclusive document. It’s sexist, at least by our standards. It’s not gay-friendly. Nor is it written in the spirit of Polonius’s feel-good dictum, “To thine own self be true” (Hamlet I.iii.78). Heterosexual marriage—if not always monogamous marriage—is presented throughout the Bible as an earthly ideal, a sturdy stitch in the social fabric; that is the context in which God’s first command to the (as yet unnamed) first man and woman must be understood: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28). The only way for them to fulfill God’s command, clearly, is to engage in sexual intercourse.
This doesn’t mean that the only God-sanctioned purpose of sex is procreation. If that were the case, married couples couldn’t continue to have intercourse after the wife has experienced menopause—a prohibition no mainstream Jewish or Christian sect espouses. To underscore the point, consider that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, was decades beyond the age of childbearing (Gen 18:11) when she miraculously “conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age” (21:2). It seems altogether reasonable to conclude that the two of them were having sex for reasons besides procreation prior to conceiving their son Isaac.
If God has given His metaphoric thumbs up to sexual relations for purposes other than populating the planet, it is nonetheless true that the Bible is replete with admonitions against sex. What’s more, the distinction between licit and illicit sex isn’t quite as straightforward as sex inside marriage versus sex outside marriage. Husbands and wives, for instance, are supposed to refrain from intimacy during the wife’s menstrual period (Lev 18:19), notwithstanding the fact that they’re still married. So under what conditions is sex okay? For the sake of brevity, as well as clarity, let’s pose the question in the negative: When is sex not okay?
Taking their cues from scripture, Jews and Christians have answered that question in diverse ways. Even within the two traditions, there is a wide diversity of opinions among believers. But insofar as Judeo-Christian attitudes toward sex can be encapsulated in a single sentence, it might be: Don’t have sex just because it feels good. In other words, if your entire reason for engaging in sexual intercourse is physical pleasure, you shouldn’t be engaging in sexual intercourse. Reciprocity, at this level, is irrelevant. Even if both partners consent that nothing more than pleasure is sought, and even if both partners’ pleasure is indeed attained, the performance is not redeemed. The use of another person’s body to achieve sexual gratification amounts to a reduction of that person to instrumental status, or means-to-an-end. (The application of this principle in teleological arguments against slavery should be obvious.) It remains, with or without the other person’s blessing, a dehumanizing act, a failure to honor that which was created in the image of God.
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